Introducing Myself

Let me introduce myself:

I know the title of my blog is long, but I wanted that title to convey three big passions in my life that will make up the content of this blog.  

The first part of the title, of course, refers to China, where I lived and worked for over a decade, from August 2005 through June 2016.  The phrase "Gaoshou" (or 高手) literally means "high hand," and in Chinese, can also denote someone is an expert.  The two characters before it is the Chinese name for the country of China, or Zhongguo, which literally means "middle kingdom."  With my long and rich China experience, I think I can claim to be a China "Gaoshou."  My China adventure was largely spent outside the usual expat bubble.  To be sure, I spent my first two years in the country doing what many foreigners who went there in the early 2000's did, namely teaching English at Chinese universities.  However, my first China home was a lower tier city in Henan Province, an area which has been largely bypassed by the Chinese economic miracle.  I then moved to Beijing to teach for a year at the 2nd Foreign Languages University before spending years working as a corporate trainer in a subsidiary of a flagship Chinese State-Owned Enterprise, the China National Petroleum Company.  I am one of a very small handful of foreigners who can claim to have had that kind of work experience!  My last years in China were spent working as a senior research fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, an independent Chinese think tank.  There I worked on projects dealing with Chinese outward bound foreign investment, internal labor migration, including the movement of high-end talent, and Chinese Government policies around these issues.

The "mountain man" part of my blog title deals with another one of my big passions, hiking in the mountains.  I was born and raised in Central California.  As I grew up, my father took me on camping trips every summer in the high Sierra Nevada.  That experience instilled in me a lifelong love for these magnificent mountains (and mountains in general).  After leaving California to do graduate school, I returned to the Gold State in the 1990s and prior to moving to China, I did 1,500 miles hiking, mainly on backpacking trips up and down the High Sierra crest, from Cottonwood Pass, south of Mount Whitney, to Sonora Pass, north of Yosemite National Park.  After returning from China, I bagged numerous summits on day hikes not just in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but California's coastal mountains as well.  I am now up to 44 peaks climbed and would like to do 60 summits while my 60s--there's a nice symmetry to that!   

The "food maven" component of the blog title is about my love of food and cooking food.  While I have been cooking for myself nearly all of my adult life, I got really into cooking after returning from China.  Besides being an immensely fun thing to do, I found that cooking is a great way to center oneself and relieve stress, something we all need to do, don't we.  I do all kinds of main dishes, such as Italian, French, Pacific Northwest, German cuisines, as well as baking cakes.  The latter include various almond, sponge, chocolate, coffee, and pound cakes, as well as short bread, scones, Irish Soda Bread, and cookies.  I look forward to sharing my culinary adventures and creations with readers of this blog.