Mother Teresa was born on August 26^th,1910 in Skopje, Macedonia. She always wrote her birthday as 27^th of August because it was the day of her baptism(洗礼), which was always more important to her than her birthday. For her work with the poor around the world, she received the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize.

    In 1928, she accepted a religious order and took the name Teresa. The order immediately sent her to India. A few years later, she began teaching in Calcutta. In 1948 the Catholic(天主教的) Church agreed her request and let her enter the convent(女修道院) and she began to work for the poor people. She became an Indian citizen in the following year. In 1950, she set up a religious organization in Calcutta. The organization provided food for the poor people and then she set up hospitals, schools, youth centers, and homes for the sick and the dying poor. It now has branches in 50 Indian cities and 30 other countries.

    Besides the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa has received other awards for her work with the poor people. On September 5^th,1997, Mother Teresa passed away, but she will continue to inspire people all over the world through her lasting present of love and faith.

    About 15 years ago, I taught A Problem from Hell, a book on genocides (大屠杀), to a group of 18- and 19-year-olds in a mid-west university in the US. In my class there was a young man who had spent his boyhood in Bosnia as NATO bombed his hometown. My other students, amazed by his connection to the genocide in the textbook, asked him what it was like to grow up in a war-zone. "A pretty normal childhood as you had here," he said. "We played cards inside a lot, and when there was no bombing we kicked a ball in the street."

    In the past few years, the world has seen a rapid increase in refugees (难民), with the number hitting 60 million. Viet Thanh Nguyen's story collection The Refugees reminds us that literature is news that stays news. Set in the Vietnamese communities in California as well as in Vietnam, the stories do not aim to surprise us with new twists or shock us with wonderful details, as war and refugee stories could easily choose to do. Rather, like the young man from Bosnia, Nguyen's characters tell these stories because they are the only ones known to them.

    Included in the collection are two of the most touching pieces, both about siblings (兄弟或姊妹) separated by geography and history. In "Black-Eyed Women", the narrator (讲述人), a young Vietnamese woman, is visited by the ghost of her elder brother, who died young on the boat when the family took flight from the war. The tale of love and loss, violence and violation, may not be unfamiliar to the reader, but the determination of the brother's ghost (he has taken decades to swim across the Pacific to reach America) and the sister's abandoning herself to a half death make the story lasting.

    As an echo, the closing story, "Fatherland", explores a more complex situation between two siblings. The narrator, a young Vietnamese woman, meets her half-sister, visiting from the US for the first time. Adding to the tension is the fact that her father has named the narrator and her siblings after his first set of children. Two sisters, one American and one Vietnamese, yet named the same by the father – it may sound strange, but isn't it the fate many refugees have to face: a life left behind, that could have been theirs; and a life in an adopted country.

    The theme of doubleness –  choice and inevitability (不可避免性), home and homelessness, starting afresh and being stuck – is present not only in the stories of Vietnamese refugees, but also of those who have become refugees from their own homes and loved ones. "Smiling at your relatives never got you very far, but smiling at strangers and acquaintances sometimes did." So a pilot, who fought in the Vietnam war and is now revisiting the country for the first time, thinks while waving at the locals from a tour bus. He's distant from his daughter, just as a Mexican American in the collection is distant from his wife, or a young man from Hong Kong is distant from his father.

    The collection is full of refugees, whether from external or from a deeper, more internal conflict between even those who are closest to each other. With anger but not despair, with reconciliation (和解) but not unrealistic hope, and with genuine humour that is not used to insult anyone, Nguyen has breathed life into many unforgettable characters.

    Amazing Movies

    Are you looking for some movies? You've landed on the right place. Let's take a look at the list I've collected.

    Picasso Blue and Rose' at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris

    Through Jan.6.2019

    In its first major partnership with the Musée National Picasso﹣Paris, the Mus6e d'Orsay presents a show about Pablo Picasso's "Blue and Rose periods. "Some iconic（标志性的）Picasso works from this period in 1900～1906 ﹣﹣which experts consider a key point in his career—will make their first appearance in France for this exhibit. The show features over 300 works, including 80 paintings, 150 drawings, sculptures and prints, alongside photographs and letters from this time in the artist's life.

    'Hodler Parallelism' at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland

    Through Jan. 13, 2019

    This year marks a century since the death of one of Switzerland's most famous painters: Ferdinand Hodler. To honor his great achievements, the Kunstmuseum Bem and Geneva's Museum of Art and History have joined forces for a show focused on his theory of parallelism. Hodler considered parallelism a key principle of his work and employed it through the use of repetition, patterns, symmetry（对称） and mirror images, The show features 99 of Holder' s works.

    Claude Monet' at the Albertina in Vienna

    Through Jan. 6, 2019

    For the first time in over 20 years, a large﹣scale Monet exhibit can be seen in Austria. The Alhertina has gathered 100 paintings from more than 40 international museums and private collections, including the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery in London, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.  Highlights include the works: "On the Boat," "Boulevard des Capucines," "Grainstack in Sunlight," and "The Japanese Bridge."

    Have you ever spent an afternoon in the backyard, maybe grilling or enjoying a basketball game, when suddenly you notice that everything goes quiet? There is an old phrase "calm before the storm", often used in a situation—a quiet period just before a great activity or excitement. According to our own experience, we know there is actually calm before the storm. But what causes this calm? And is it always calm before the storm? Let's hear what scientists have to say.

    A period of calm happens in a particular kind of storm, the simplest kind of storm—a single-cell thunderstorm. In this type of thunderstorm, there is usually only one main updraft, which is warm, damp air and drawn from places near the ground. Storms need warm and damp air as fuel, so they typically draw that air in from surrounding environment. Storms can draw in the air that fit their need from all directions—even from the direction in which the storm is traveling.

    As the warm, damp air is pulled into a storm system, it leaves a low-pressure vacuum (真空) coming after. The rising air meets the cold dry air that has already existed in the storm clouds, thus the temperature of the warm, damp air drops, and the water vapour (水蒸汽) in it changes into tiny drops that are a precondition of rain. These drops accumulate and build on larger particles like dust, until they grow large enough to form raindrops.

    This warm, damp air keeps moving upwards, but it becomes cooler and drier during its trip through cloud. When it reaches the top of the cloud, the air gets spit out (被挤出) at the top. This air is sent rolling out over the big thunderclouds. From there, the air goes down. Warm and dry air is relatively stable, and once it covers a region, that air, in turn, causes the calm before a storm.

    Most thunderstorms, though, don't start with calm. That's because most are actually groups of storms with complex wind patterns. There's so much air moving up and down storm groups that the calm before the storm never happens. Instead, before the storm,让 might be really windy!

    The Chinese invented paper in 105 A. D. They mixed the bark of a tree and rags (破布) with water, put a screen into the mixture, and lifted out a thin piece of wet paper. They dried the paper in the sun.

    The Chinese kept their secret of how to make paper until a war with Muslims in the ninth century. The art of papermaking soon spread throughout the Muslim world.

    The Mayan Indians in Central America and Pacific Islanders also discovered how to make paper, but their knowledge never spread to the rest of the world.

    For centuries, all paper was made by hand. Rags were the main material. Then a French scientist discovered that people could make paper from wood, too. Finally, in the eighteenth century, a Frenchman invented a machine to make paper from wood.