While most of the annual Spring Festival migration is from big cities to the small cities and the countryside as workers, students, and whoever else was able to find a plane or train ticket leaves their jobs for a week to spend the holiday with the family back home, I have noticed over the last [...]
Archive for 2007
Ensure Chinese New Year Goes Off With A Bang
Chinese new year, also known as Spring Festival (or as the lunar new year), is but six days away. Think: food, lanterns, rice wine, the colour red, and fireworks. Yes, nearly a ton of fireworks will be bought by every household, to the delight of family members both old and young, as they caress hand-held [...]
The Sex Is Back: Return of Chinabounder
Anyone active in the China blogsphere back in August surely remembers Chinabounder and his rather conspicuous blog “Sex And Shanghai“. The blog received some rather heated attention (making it as far as the nightly news in Shanghai) mostly brought on by Professor Zhang Jiehai and his call to hunt down the author because of the [...]
After the Quake…
Reflections on a month spent wandering the Chinese Internet: China was hit hard about a month ago by the big Boxing Day earthquake in Taiwan, which knocked out or hindered access to most foreign websites from behind the great wall. As one Chinese acquaintance of mine put it “This is really a big inconvenience for [...]
Chinese Internet Nationalism
Zhang Ziyi is in the headlines here in China again. She was seen recently at a NY Knicks game with a laowai nanyou, or foreign boyfriend. The outrage from people writing comments is amazing. Although she has become famous in Japan, Korea, and the US, she has a hard time here in the mainland. Some [...]
Coffee Talk: Rui Chenggang
A couple days ago Danwei and Imagethief both had good posts that gave a couple varying opinions on the recent increase in attention to the Starbucks in the Forbidden City. The issue has been recently stirred up by CCTV anchorman Rui Chenggang and his call for Starbucks to get out and stay out of one [...]
Clearing up the China Funk
Today, one of my friends said to me “dude, you seem so bitter lately,” and after a little introspection I realized that he was right – I have been bitter lately. It seems like lots of things have gone wrong all at once, and I’m starting to generalize my dislike for the things that have [...]
The Grey Matter of Snake Heads
I recently caught this article in my CBC news feed and it got me thinking about what the Chinese call “snake heads“. They are so named for ‘leading/heading’ groups of “rénshé” into other countries. Rénshé is the slang for those Chinese that slither across borders into other countries illegally. Poetic language, Chinese is. Snake heads [...]
Writers Wanted
Hey you. Yeah, you with the chopstick cramped hands, belly full of Gong Bao Ji Ding and a cough that just wont go away. We’re looking for a few people with a unique voice and solid relationship with their keyboard to help us fill this space with more than just requests for writers. Now that [...]
The Search Strings Are Frayed
It would seem that it’s becoming more and more popular to mine your stat programs for blog topics, and we’d be remiss here at Lost Laowai if we didn’t do the same. Now I’m not going to go on and on about how our number of visitors have doubled in three months (yep… went from [...]
