Warnings Posts

Seventy Six Trombones Led the Big Parade

Seventy six trombones led the big parade in the Music Man. One hundred and ten cornets were following right behind. All of them were delivered by the Wells Fargo man. It’s a shame that Wells Fargo doesn’t have their act together as well as they did back in River City. Maybe if they did, my parents would still have access to their bank account. Of course “parents” starts with P and that rhymes with T and that stands for “trouble” so it’s possible that something would have still gone wrong.

Trust me, I’m a laowai: Canadian scam man in Shanghai disappears with 300K

A new year and a new douche bag to add to our “Bad Laowai” category. Ryan Fedoruk, a 40-year-old former part-time English teacher from Canada, sublet about 30 apartments to more than 100 foreigners in Shanghai before taking the money and running.

A few signs your MA in TESOL program is a bad choice

I’ve given some thought to doing an MA in TESOL. After all, I taught it in China, liked it, so why not earn 5,000 RMB a month instead of a mere 4800? All I need is a golden ticket. Luckily, I found one, via a Google ad on a message board. Upon seeing the heading, [...]

Doin’ time: how to end up in a Chinese jail

iLook China recently ran a guest post by Lionel Carver (no idea if that’s a pseudonym or not), which details the writer’s experience being a guest of the government in a Chinese jail.

Subtitled with “A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China“, I was curious to read both what Carver endured and, perhaps most voyeuristically, what he did to get there.

His description of the long boring days (all eight of them), spartan comforts, and brief brush with man-on-man-on-man action were not without their charms. However, throughout the telling, I was finding it hard not to feel like Lionel got exactly what he asked for.

Banned pesticides in Chinese produce — no surprise, nothing’s safe

A couple years ago I wrote about how absent trust is in day-to-day living in China. With food scare after food scare, unfortunately nothing seems to be improving.

So, it’s little surprise to read that Greenpeace is reporting, “Banned pesticides detected on vegetables in Tesco and other supermarkets in China.” The following sums up the report well:

Foreigner deafens doctor, trashes hospital and slaughters innocent fish

Two Italians, a Chinese and a Japanese walk into a hospital…

This would be the start to a joke, if it didn’t end with a perforated ear drum, a smashed monitor, some dead fish and perpetuation of the stereotype that foreigners in China all view themselves as overly-entitled drunken douchebags.

The China-Wide-Web

As I write this, I am listening to Radio Free Asia, a podcast which I subscribed to on iTunes with no hassle. After I finish writing this, I plan, just for shits and grins, to run a Google search on Liu Xiaobo and proclaim my love for a free Tibet on Twitter. When I first [...]

On being harmful to social management

According to a post on Global Voices, Sven Englund, a Swede studying in Shanghai’s Fudan University, has been interrogated and has had his passport confiscated by Shanghai police after writing a “letter” to the Chinese President Hu Jintao in his Chinese-language blog.

Not wishing to bring any undue wrath down on me or mine, I’ll not re-post Sven’s letter, which GV has translated. Essentially it asks China’s president to join him in a flash mob event in Shanghai (or the president’s city of choice) on July 1st promoting “freedom”.

According to his summoning notice, Sven is suspected of “being harmful to social management” and has violated article 55 of the “PRC social security management law”, which I’m guessing is the one about no protesting or organizing large gatherings without permission.

My gut reaction is: Sven, dude… what were you thinking?

How prepared are you for an overseas emergency?

The game Scruples; that’s the first thing I thought of when I read “Plea for help to get sick Aussie home” in the Canberra Times this morning. The Department of Foreign Affairs has refused to fund the repatriation of a former air force serviceman who has been in a coma in a Chinese hospital for [...]

The 7 Year Laowai: Part 8 – The Graveyard of all Ambition

… He died an old man in a cold Chinese hospital an entire hemisphere removed from everyone and everything he had ever known. Surrounded by strangers, he couldn’t even have read his own obituary.

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