I was pretty eager to sit down and watch "Seeking Asian Female", Debbie Lam's new documentary exploring 'Yellow Fever'. I've always been a bit skeptical about the whole Asian fetish thing, and, admittedly, a bit defensive about it -- my wife is Asian and I'm Caucasian.
I suppose the thing that gets my back up is the hinted presumption that all white people with Asian partners are somehow suffering from a fetish. O…
It was my intention to sit down and write a review of "The Man with the Iron Fists" this week. I just watched it a couple nights ago, and had a lot to say about it. Well, enough to fill a few paragraphs here. I was going to cry foul my disappointment at what RZA had led me to believe was going to be some grade-A, genera respecting, childhood VHS watching retrospecting, B-grade brilliance.
It wasn't.
However, be…
This week FluentU (who changed their name from Fluent Fix - which personally, I liked a bit more) announced that they now have over 300 videos available for Chinese study on their site. 308, at the moment actually, and more all the time. Congratulations to the FluentU team on all that hard work!
But what's FluentU anyway, you ask? In their own words:
"FluentU is a new way to learn Chinese through authentic vi…
Truthfully, I didn't know what to expect when I hit play on Dayyan Eng's latest film, Inseparable. A look at the cover had me curious, a look at the cast had me interested and a look at its location had me sold.
But, if you're expecting Inseparable to be Kick-Ass, it isn't. If you're expecting it to be Kevin Spacey at his usually susexpected self, he isn't. If you're expecting it to be your typical Chinese film, i…
I started writing a review of Leslie T. Chang's "Factory Girls" several months ago when I first finished the book. Embarrassingly my attraction to shiny objects and bits of ribbon had shuffled the unfinished post into what was surely eternal-draftdom, until I happened across it this morning while doing some housekeeping here on Lost Laowai.
My lateness in posting the review is perhaps fitting considering I was qui…
I'm going to assume that most of the readers of Lost Laowai are the kind of people who bother to run VPNs and the kind of people who follow the China blogosphere. If so, they may have seen Troy Parfitt's "Why China Will Never Rule the World" coming up again and again. Peking Duck, Seeing Red in China, China Law Blog, they've all written reviews on it and they've all covered different but equally valid aspects of why …
For the laowai who likes movies, there are certainly a number of offerings available this month to tempt you out to the movie theater instead of staying at home and watching pirated DVDs. While Nicki has just reviewed the "Flowers of War" with its serious historical plot line involving things few of us really want to think about, I'd like to take this time to talk about pure fluff.
My parents are visiting from the…
Today, for my all-to-close-to-Christmas birthday, my hubby took me on a date. We saw the new and somewhat controversial Zhang Yi Mou directed "The Flowers of War," starring Christian Bale.
For those of you who haven't been following the controversy involving Mr. Bale, the movie is a period piece set during 1937's Rape of Nanjing. Since it's a war film, and especially since it is a Chinese-made film about the Japan…
I'm a huge bibliophile. When I moved to China in 2005, half my luggage weight allotment went to books. I knew that, living in Hainan, I probably wouldn't have access to the kind of foreign language (i.e. English) bookstores you can find in Beijing or Shanghai. So I brought my own. Of course I could never bring enough. Not even enough for the first year that we had committed to, let alone the nearly seven total that w…
If you’re planning a trip, or living in China, chances are you own a Lonely Planet guidebook. In the past, using LP showed the world you were young and crazy, and would rather stick toothpicks in your eyes than hit up the main tourists spots with all the other blue-hairs. (Or as others saw you: stoner punks who trashed obscure tropical beaches looking for the best banana pancakes.)
But nowadays it is just as comm…
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