Any time China hits the headlines, I get the distinct feeling that our perception of that country is stalled somewhere around the time of Tiananmen Square or thereabouts. The old saying goes that if it bleeds, it leads. With that filter in hand, you’d be hard-pressed to find media coverage that let the Chinese appear for what they are: a flawed country, for sure, but one that’s also richly textured by a lot of the same things we go through in our country.

So you’re in your family room playing Wii with your highly political friends, and one of them, the one with the goatee, of course, asks whom you’re going to vote for. You freeze and put your Wii remote down and scratch your head. Sure, your friend’s out-of-the-blue question threw you off guard, but still, you hadn’t pondered about this, so what now?

As Editor-in-Chief of Touchstones, UVSC’s literary journal, I would like to comment on last week’s article concerning the launch of this semester’s issue. The article makes assertions espoused neither by myself nor the current Touchstones staff. My hope is to correct any misconceptions this article may have created.