A couple of weeks ago I saw something that I’ve been trying to make sense of ever since. Here’s what happened: I was on a bus here in Suzhou, which drew up to a set of traffic lights at an intersection. To my right, on the corner of the road, I noticed on old woman [...]
Archive for April, 2007
1.3 Billion Reasons Not To Travel During May Holiday
Ah, May Holiday – one of China’s shimmering Golden Week vacations. Just a quick little reminder what awaits any laowai silly enough to venture outside and catch up on travel next week. 1.view full post for image 2.view full post for image 3.
Sending packages home? Leave out the DVDs
Anyone who’s lived in China for more than a couple weeks has likely amassed a pile of pirated DVDs. Coming from Western countries where the prices are 15-30x more, it’s tough to throw even the worst ones away (I’ve still got my copy of Benchwarmers for Christ’s sake). Getting them home is one of the [...]
Chinese Protester Crashes The Gates
A supporter of open-source software managed to take the spotlight away from the bazillion dollar man, Bill Gates, during the Windows creator’s visit to Beijing yesterday. The unidentified man waited until Billy was finished congratulating some students at Beijing University, and then stormed the stage brandishing a sign stating: “Free Software, Open Source” I saw [...]
Brave Newer World
This is just going to be a few sentences long, but I was hoping people would check out the Manchurian Candidate’s website: www.kyle.cn It has a very interesting list of all the school killings that China has had (reported) since 2004. If you think the US is violent, check this list out.
“Now You Know What China Is Like”
This is something I wrote up in the summer of 2006, but have done nothing with since. “Now you know what China is like,” the taxi driver said after he dropped me off this evening. I dropped a friend off at her home, and as I didn’t fancy my chances at getting the last bus [...]
So what if the gunman was Chinese?
As most everyone with Internet, cable, a radio or a newspaper knows by now – there was a terrible shooting at Virginia Tech University yesterday where a man shot and killed 32 people, injuring 15 others. What’s quickly coming to light is that the killer was very likely a 25-year-old Chinese man in the US [...]
Special English, another Christ, and Nazi
Time and again, I find the things I enjoy most about my job have little to do with teaching and everything to do with the absurdities I confront in the classroom. I wonder sometimes if this makes me a poor educator, but I don’t linger on it. My students have no books, their teacher has [...]
Sub-standard Pay = Super-sized Profits
The big news in China the past couple weeks has been about Western fast food chains (McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut) underpaying their staff in China – particularly the part-timers. The issue was sparked by accusations from China’s top trade union that McDonald’s was underpaying their employees (Reuters/China Daily), in some places by almost half, [...]
Lost Laowai on Facebook.com
Just a quick note to say that Lost Laowai now has its own official group on Facebook. If you’re a member of the popular social networking site, be sure to join the group of fellow lost laowai! Come see who else is a member, put faces to names around the China blogsphere (yikes!), ask questions [...]
