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The “Books for China” Project
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(For new reader and those who request 好友请求, please read my 公告栏 first).
I have officially retired from Harvard for seven years now. Although Harvard has been extremely gracious letting me keep my office and assistant all these time, I don’t want to overstay my welcome particularly since office space is always at a premium. So the problem arises as to what to do with all the books, journals, and documents I accumulated over a period of 46 years. Even with three moves to new offices internally during this period when I cleared out some old stuff, I have a major problem on hand. A simple solution is to dump everything without thinking which is what I plan to do with my personal documents. But it seems a shame to throw away perfectly good books and journals collected over the years. Fortunately, through friends I came to learn that a Dr. John Ma has a “Books for China” project where he collect books and journals from people like me and ship them to universities and libraries in less developed parts of China. The deal is that if you get the stuff delivered to a Brooklyn NY shipping office, he will see to their delivery to a selected university in China. My collection will go to 东南大学 in 南京.
This seemed a god-send solution for my books/journals until I investigated the shipping charges from Boston to Brooklyn. The charge by the post office or other commercial delivery service will be over $2000 at least (I have over 2400 lbs/1000+kg of stuff). Again the helpfulness of my college fraternity brothers came to my rescue. We organize three cars and three other able bodied young men (not counting three 70+ persons) to help load the three cars and drive to Brooklyn NY on Saturday. May 17, 2008.
We met on Friday afternoon May 16 to load the three cars (including my own truck) with 24 file drawer size boxes. The trip started in early morning at 6:30 am of May 17, 2008 for the 4 hour nonstop drive to Brooklyn NY. By 11:30am we have completed the delivery and went to Flushing, NY Chinatown for a delicious Chinese Dim-Sum lunch given by local fraternity brothers. After lunch, I took a long nap and decided to make the drive home alone the same day. The round trip consumed nine hours of driving and over 450 miles. Given one mile is over 2 Chinese miles. I cannot help but be reminded by the famous 李白 verse – 千里江山一曰返 (correction: 千里江陵一曰还).
Information for “Books for China” Project
c/o Dr. John T. MA
E-mail:johntajenma@att.net
Photo of the delivery team
Photo of one of the two pallets of books and journals
https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-25778.html
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