Cultural understanding; it’s a lot of what this fine multi-authored blog is all about. So, in my latest missive for Lost Laowai, I’ll get straight to the point in trying to help you understand the sociological signage and semiology of contemporary Chinese male fashion.
All right, I’ll come clean, that’s just an excuse for a new cartoon. The subject is the thought-process behind a middle-income, middle-aged Chinese male - yes, men only - choosing clothes. Just remember, peeps, this is to be filed under ‘cultural understanding’, not ’satire’. Ithangyou. The cartoon is one image, which will load below:
In my four years in China I’ve yet to see a legitimate version of any software here. Generally when purchasing apps and games in the Middle Kingdom you have two choices - pirated software that looks pirated, and pirated software that looks real.
Like pretty much every other media, most notably DVDs, the software industry suffers greatly from the blatant distribution of pirated products in China - and most Chinese don’t give a damn.
Scratch that, most Chinese likely don’t have any real concept of what the difference is between paying for legitimate …
I remember back at the turn of the century, as I was just getting out of college and heading into a job at a music magazine, thinking how depressing the music scene was. As a highschooler growing up in the early-mid 90s indie scene, it was depressing to see the majority of listeners having turned to pre-fab crap sung by no-talent tarts.
But then in a blink of an eye the music was back (with a disproportionate number of “the” bands - The White Stripes, The Hives, The Strokes, The Vines, The Music, The Killers) and life was good.
And what’s the reasoning for this useless anecdote? To illustrate that all good …
After wandering the halls of the China blogsphere for a few years now, it generally takes a pretty unique China-themed site to raise my eyebrow. ChinaSMACK is just such a site.
Essentially the site digs up, translates and reposts all the shit and sludge, peppered liberally with the plain weird, that are hot (or “viral”) topics in the Chinese-language Internet (blogs, bbs, etc.).
The site is well summed up by its tagline:
“Viral Chinese internet stories, pictures, & videos, translated. See what’s so popular, sexy, scandalous, or shocking behind the Great Wall”
I remember back in the early days of the net me and my high school buddies couldn’t get enough of the site rotten.com …
This guy has guts. And I like him for a bunch of reasons.
For those who don’t know, Hong Laowai (means “Red Foreigner”) has been a bit of an internet celeb over the past year. He stands in front of a webcam, and belts out the most ridiculous old communist propaganda tunes. But you can see he’s having a good time with it, and a lot of it is tongue-in-cheek.
Unlike Dashan, I like Hong Laowai because he knows he’s being ridiculous.
I love music. Don’t well all? Music is awesome. But I hate pre-fab pop. Don’t we all? Pre-fab pop is crap.
That China’s mainstream music scene is near completely made up of boy bands and girl groups is a sad fact. But mainstream music scenes usually are (sad facts). So, when after digging around a bit I couldn’t find even the remotest signs of an independent music scene to offset the crud cracking out of cheap shop-front speakers, I was crushed.
That was three years ago. Despite being a musician (of sorts) and having worked as a music journalist (of sorts) before coming to China - I shelved my musical appetite and accepted that when it came to …
Recently a friend forwarded my name to a freelance reporter for the China Daily Hong Kong edition. Yes, like many of you, I didn’t know China Daily had a Hong Kong edition …more on that later.
The Canadian born Chinese China Daily reporter emailed me a list of questions regarding English teaching and English use here in Hong Kong and I was more than happy to help her out. I even invited her out to join some friends of mine for dinner later and she commented that she’s “always searching around for freelance gigs and it helps to talk to journalists and people looking for English-language writers.”
In my email I casually asked the reporter what the readership numbers of the China …
I just got finished reading that Time Out Beijing, one of the city’s preeminent English-language entertainment guides, has been suspended indefinitely.
Not, as one might guess, because it had been publishing subvert-the-youth articles or anything of the sort - but simply because it wasn’t properly licensed.
Fair enough.
I mean, in pretty much any country you’d need proper business licenses and if you didn’t have them, you could be shut down for any number of legalities. That’s not too bizarre.
But the part that I think is… amusing (?)… is that the magazine was operating just fine for more than three years without complaint, or proper forms filled in.
This is strikingly in line with the …
Perhaps it was in the strictest sense an unlawful gathering; maybe they were naive. But the people who were assembled in Tiananmen Square on this day in 1989 formed a cross section of Chinese society. From farmers to teachers, students to shopkeepers, and factory workers to intellectuals, all were looking to their government to fulfill the promises enshrined in the very name of the country; the People’s Republic of China.
Indignant towards widespread corruption and angered by the staggering indifference of a party elite more interested in their own private power squabbles, the People came together to ask for a better tomorrow. Nineteen years later most of them have their wish.
None of those gathered were …
What follows is the fourth part of a series of posts we’re running by fellow Laowai - Turner Sparks. Turner and his friend Jake decided just sitting around Suzhou and watching quake relief efforts on TV was not good enough, and so hopped into Turner’s car and pointed it towards Chengdu. Read
Part I,
Part II and
Part III
After spending Wednesday down at the Red Cross continuing to load and unload supply trucks, we returned Thursday to find out our services were no longer needed as they already had enough volunteers.
One trip through the …
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