Cup of Cha
This is China

I just wanted to share with you an odd little Chinese Christmas (OK, actually Spring Festival) gift I found. As you probably know Chinese people tend to give money in red envelopes as gifts. Well, someone realized that there is no middle man cashing in on this idea, and figured out a way to sell [...]

Continue reading “A Chinese Christmas Gift” »

Imagine my surprise when I ran across a Chinese discussion board that made reference to my blog (my old one too in fact). As I scrolled through the comments I realized that they were writing about a lot of the blogs that I know. When I tried use Google to find more similar discussions nothing [...]

Continue reading “What Chinese People are Saying about our Blogs” »

I’ll admit it: When I saw that David Brooks wrote a column about China today, I expected to hear the same silliness that I’ve seen from other journalists. I was prepared to be underwhelmed. Fortunately he did not claim that the world is flat, or that China is a time bomb waiting to explode. [...]

Continue reading “David Brooks Knows China (Circa 1997)” »

I’ve lived in China for four years, give or take, and I’ve only ever had one bike stolen. This is a miracle. It’s true, I may have just jinxed myself, but I was looking at my bike today, and it’s not in great shape anyway. If someone stole it I could just buy a new [...]

Continue reading “The Disposable Chinese Bike” »

If you want to make a lot of money, you should become an NBA player. If you’re already an NBA player, and you want to make more money, demand a trade the Rockets. Mr. Yao Ming has made a good chunk of change for a couple teammates. In short, it pays to live in Houston, [...]

Continue reading “Send Me to Houston, I Wanna be Rich!” »

The internets has made buying Olympic tickets one of the easiest things in the world. Before the internets, a series of tubes that connect people to one another, it would have been impossible to sell tickets to sporting events. This is why events prior to 1996 had no people in attendance.
For the Beijing Games, an [...]

Continue reading “Olympic Ticket Confusion, Part Deux” »

The Chinese tax system has driven me to resemble a bag women, grabbing at scraps, just to save a few kuai here and there. You’ve surely seen this epidemic, and maybe are ever part of it. The government allows companies to provide up to 40% of income to employees as living/housing stipends , which [...]

Continue reading “Grabbing at Receipts” »

To be honest, I’ve never really celebrated Thanksgiving in China. My first year (2001) the university I worked at sent all the foreign teachers to a Chinese restaurant. The director of foreign affairs clearly had no interest in being there, and sat himself at a table of his cohorts and did not speak to the [...]

Continue reading “Thanksgiving Fried Rice!” »

Yi Jianlian, a basketball player between 6′7″ and 7′ tall, between 16 and 24 years of age, is everything good, and everything bad about China. I can’t imagine one person summarizing an entire nation’s potential and possible peril more than this man.
Mr. Yi was chosen as a high lottery pick in this year’s NBA’s draft [...]

Continue reading “Yi Jianlian Personifies China’s Contradiction” »

Apparently Neil Armstrong has some [cachet] in China. In some weird places. While I was, uh, standing at the urinal in a hot pot restaurant’s bathroom, I notice this slogan on the wall:
往前一小步
文明一大步
Literally it means “a little step forward is a big step toward being civilized.” It beat out the other option the restaurant [...]

Continue reading “Toward the Urinal, Man of Culture” »