The fireworks have almost all fizzled out, and the red cardboard from exploded firecrackers has largely been swept up, leaving everyone in China facing the various flip-sides of Chinese new year, and the prospect of having pretty much nothing to do for the remaining four or five days of the holiday.

I myself have found three glaring flip-sides of Chinese new year:

Half-empty cities: I can only account for this city, Suzhou, but it’s obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes that half of the city’s usual inhabitants and passers-through are all gone. This leaves an eerie, almost ghostly feeling out on the streets, especially in daytime. When I popped out to the DVD store earlier (one of only half …

When I was teaching kids English in China, I often felt like I was just going through the motions of the job. It’s not that I didn’t care. Because I did. But it seemed the schools didn’t care about teaching quality as long as they got tuition from the parents, and the parents didn’t give a be-jeesis either as long as they had their kid interacting with a real live foreigner. I thought to myself one day, I said “You know, self, your job could easily be replaced by a Sesame Street …

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 few years that there is also a little reverse migration, mostly the parents and older relatives of younger city dwellers coming to check out the metropolis in which their son or daughter lives. In Shanghai it’s rather easy to find these people because, quite simply, they stick out like sore thumbs, their raw Chinese-ness in contrast with an increasingly international metropolitan city.

Yesterday I ate …

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 explosives in the spirit of celebration.

Here are some fireworks-related words of advice and wise counsel for the general public - locals and expats alike - to ensure maximum enjoyment of this colourful and, er, incendiary holiday season, in the form of a twelve-point guideline:

This time of year can be a bit breezy or windy, so ensure that your lighters flame catches the fuse by opening …

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 blog’s content, which is essentially a Western man detailing his sexcapades with local Chinese girls.

Zhang’s hunt for the Chinabounder ended with the operator(s) of the site shutting it down. Rumors abounded, with the rather weighty Sydney Morning Harold reporting that it was all a hoax created by a group of performance artists …

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 you foreigners, not having access to foreign sites.”

“Yes, it is,” I said “But I’m sure it was a much bigger inconvenience to many in …