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... I was blog tagged by Dean Wette and Brian Gilstrap. So here's my five things that you probably don't know:

1. I was born and raised in a big city of 4,000,000 people (current population 10,000,000). Wikipedia has this to say about my home town:

   People from Tianjin are stereotyped to be eloquent, humorous, open, and unfettered. There is a term for the stereotype of the always-eloquent and sometimes-humorous Tianjin native: w��izu��zi (S: ��������� / T: ���������), which translates roughly as "the Tianjin mouth".

2. I had my one year of fame when I was 17. I won the first prize in the Chinese National High School Mathematics Competition (which later turned into the Chinese Mathematics Olympiad.) I was written up in the People's Daily (a very big deal). My name was a household name in Tianjin.

   Years later, when I saw another Chinese couple moving in to the St. Louis apartment complex I lived in, and greeted them, the conversation went like this: "Hi, Are you from China?" "Yes. We just moved to St. Louis. My name is so-and-so." When I told them my name, the husband went "Aren't you the winner of the math competition?"

3. People who know me first through my blog, or my USENET postings before the internet, are surprised when they meet me in person. I'm not at all like my online persona.

4. My first computer had 8MB of memory and runs at 33MHz. I paid extra for a model that had a math coprocessor.

5. Unlike most of the people in my generation, who like pop music and movies and modern plays, and like people in an earlier generation, I am a fan of Peking Opera. Here's a six-minute excerpt from my favorite play. Enjoy (or endure):

Now I tag Kevin, Dale, Justin, and David.