January 2012
34 posts
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Last Train Home →
One of the best documentaries I’ve seen in the past few years is about Chinese New Year, at least superficially. Last Train Home uses the holiday as temporal mooring to follow one family that typifies life in China in the 21st century in many ways. I highly, highly recommend it, even if you’re not particularly interested in this part of the world, and especially in light of The...
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In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad →
This one already has 319 comments online and has been reblogged 8 bajillion times (estimate), despite the fact that the print version is just now being tossed onto doorsteps on the East Coast. Nonetheless, a must-link-to. Three cheers for old-school investigative journalism (and for Page A1, to boot, not even the Magazine)!
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"Spring Festival" is Half-Right, Anyway
I don’t think I ever knew until I got here that Chinese New Year is also known as Spring Festival. Which is funny — funny Chinesely, not funny ha-ha — because it’s effing freezing outside right now. Even Punxsutawneyans would think it’s overly optimistic to call it that.
Other holidays aren’t much better. Last fall, the Mid-Autumn Festival took place on Sept....
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Gong Xi Fa Cai, Everyone! →
Cool little web video from The Times.
(And incidentally, I just learned that it’s not “Gung hey fat choy,” not in Mandarin, anyway. That’s Cantonese. Strange that that’s the version they taught us in elementary school, given that most Asian-Americans’ families don’t come from Hong Kong or Guangdong.)
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Taiwan Election Stirs Hopes Among Chinese for... →
“This is an amazing idea, to be able to choose the people who represent you,” said the man, who asked to remain nameless so he could speak without restraint. “I think democracy will come to China. It’s only a matter of time.”
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WatchThe aforementioned opening-ceremonies welcome-show of some sort. A good example of something I’ve learned ex-pats would call “very Chinese.”
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WatchI was walking down Zhongyang Jie (“Central Street”), Harbin’s famous pedestrian-only thoroughfare, when this happened.
(Forgive the shoddy camerawork. I’m new at the whole “moving pictures” thing.)
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“Dirty, crowded, and dangerous. Everything that is Harbin — Russians,...”
– Wikitravel’s description of Blue’s club in Harbin, where I am now. Sounds like my type of place.
Incidentally, Wikitravel has become my go-to travel source.
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Chinese President Hu Jintao has told Communist... →
As a side note, you’ve gotta admire the name choice of the party magazine. A transparently propagandistic rag — as opposed to a 90%-translucently propagandistic one — would claim to have already found the Truth.
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China Set to Punish Another Human Rights Activist →
Detained after she tried to photograph demolition crews, she said she was kicked and pummeled over the course of 15 hours, leaving her incontinent and unable to walk. She was released after 75 days but continued her legal work while also seeking redress for the beating. Over the next few years, she was arrested twice more and convicted of “obstructing public business.”
During her three years in...
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December 2011
30 posts
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“The story is about the 1937 Nanjing, a Several church clergy, a group hiding in...”
– Plot synopsis of “Jinling 13 hairpin,” also known as The Flowers of War, according to a local movie theater website. I wonder what the church lady thinks of all those people hiding in her. Now I really want to see it… 