Cultural Exchange

China plans to open a cultural exchange center in the former home of Pearl S. Buck, the American author who won a Nobel prize for her novel about a Chinese peasant family, an official report said Tuesday. Buck, author of "The Good Earth," lived in China for 36 years. Her missionary parents came to Zhenjiang, in coastal Jiangsu province, in 1892, when she was an infant. Officials in Zhenjiang plan to convert her home, which has been well preserved, into a center for Sino-U.S. exchanges.

In his parody on the debate over the Strategic Defense Initiative, Alan Neidle overlooked a very important aspect of the story of "The Leopards vs. the Baboons." You see, within this community of baboons there lived a rather large family of Red-tail baboons. This particular family of baboons was not only opposed to the idea of building a strategic defensive net over the community, but had in the past opposed many other efforts on the part of the baboon leader and his supporters to protect the community from the bloodthirsty leopards.

The Cultural Education Project of Teen Post Inc. is accepting applications for 9- to 17-year-olds interested in a cultural exchange visit to Brazil. The two-week trip is scheduled for August and will include visits to Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. Cost for airfare and hotel is $1,277 per person for double occupancy, and $1,225 for triple occupancy.

Critics of imperialism have long insisted that international exchange and free trade are screens for the colonization of one culture by another. In my "Jihad vs. McWorld," for example, I argued that the dominant pop culture of the United States, embedded in fast food, fast music and fast computers, not only erodes the particularity of foreign cultures but also promotes a radical homogenization of taste and mores within American society as well as around the world.

7pm Music Conductor John Alexander will open the 34th season of the Pacific Chorale with Verdi's mighty "Manzoni" Requiem, written to commemorate the death (May 22, 1873) of the Italian poet, novelist and patriot that Verdi and most of Italy venerated. A large-scale, operatic work, the requiem makes tremendous demands upon the chorus, orchestra and soloists. Assisting here will be soprano Camellia Johnson, mezzo-soprano Robynne Redmon, tenor Philip Webb and bass-baritone Stephen Bryant.

Charles Kuralt is on the road again . . . this time, off to Moscow to chronicle the homecoming of virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz who on Sunday will play in the Soviet Union after 61 years of self-exile. In 1925, Horowitz left, seeking artistic freedom and vowing never to return. In a special two-hour broadcast of "CBS News Sunday Morning" (8-10 a.m.

  Join us at noon today for a live Google+ Hangout chat with sportswriter David Wharton and deputy sports editor John Cherwa. Wharton was in China with the UCLA men's basketball on their recent historic trip. The trip to China was a trial run, the start of what could be an annual exchange between the Pac-12 and the Federation of University Sports of China. Pac-12 officials are eager to foster relationships with a country where they might someday broadcast games and sell merchandise to a basketball-crazed populace.

In building a community in a new country, Vietnamese Americans also had to rebuild a cultural life from scratch, one that evolved and flourished in virtual isolation from the land that is its source. So says Co Pham, president of the Westminster-based Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce and a longtime (and often embattled) proponent of lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam, an action President Clinton took Thursday.

Pingpong diplomacy in 1971 smoothed U.S. relations with China. When the United States reached out to a new democratic South Africa, performers from the Dance Theater of Harlem helped forge diplomacy. As the Cold War thawed, pianist Vladimir Horowitz returned to his native Russia in 1986 to give concerts. Culture speaks a universal language and can play a critical role in U.S.

Valdes-Rodriguez's First Person column was her fourth report on the "Music Bridges" event. The other articles ran March 23, 27 and 29. What was the editorial reason for printing Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's slur of Woody Harrelson in Cuba "(An Accidental Island Tour," March 30)? Like a well-polished mirror, this bilious account gave an illuminated reflection of its author, the jaded anti-Castro expatriates she exemplifies and the increasingly smug, trivializing reporting of some of the L.A. Times' art and cultural writers.