Travis lived in China from 2008 - 2010. He continues to share his China-set fiction with Lost Laowai.
They roamed the streets of her hometown, knocking their sticks along to lay a path in that endless shade. What they could not see with their eyes the cards showed them by touch. Lu Jun was little when her mother made them show her her future. They rambled on for awhile, illshapen words boiling down to one sentence: she will be happy at a great school.
She never forgot this.
In primary school they took their les…
Is successfully using a squat toilet a sign you've "adjusted" to life in China?
I never grew comfortable with squat toilets, and the more public they were, the worse shape they were in. The absolute worst was in a public restroom in a smalltown bus station, where you had rectangle-shaped stone holes, side-by-side. No privacy.
I did everything I could to avoid using squat toilets, including running all the way f…
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, Master's in TESOL, I immediately clicked through to find a big banner full of jolly students on a pristine campus that has clearly gone beyond the cal…
Courtesy of Study More Chinese:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EfHuGMrNxc8#!
What do you all think? I'll say this: I like the track. It's easy to follow. The rhymes (at least to me) make sense, which already puts him ahead of the pack in rap music. In fact, you could say I'm 非常满意 with his effort.
With music being a great supplement for language learning, and with me liking rap, it…
Keith, already suspicious of John, is doubly suspicious now that John missed their dinner appointment. On a rainy Friday, he wonders about John's motives for being in China, as he implements a fresh idea into the classroom: a poetry exercise, where the students go outside, and use English to write a poem about what they see.
Keith started class. He did Tongue Twisters. He had arranged them in such a manner tha…
Our hero is John, who is wandering through life without purpose. This wandering led him to a humanities degree, then to unemployment, and finally, to the great refuge of unemployed humanities majors: ESL in China.
Though Wuhan later becomes an existential swamp for John, here at the beginning, everything is new and exciting.
This is John's first day of teaching, where the incumbent dancing laowai, Keith, school…
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 came to China, all the hysteria I'd heard about going to live under a Communist regime turned out to be unfounded. Chief among them: the interne…
Jack finished his last class and coming out the door he lit his first cigarette of the day.
At his apartment door, Jack crushed his fourth cigarette and took the fifth inside. He checked his phone messages. Then he stepped back out and lit number six and headed to McDonald's.
Although Jack loved Mcdonald's coffee, he did not much care for McDonald's itself, or KFC for that matter. 5,000 years of continuous civ…
I've been resisting the idea of doing a "goodbye China" post for awhile now, just as I resisted the idea that I was leaving China.
I remember clearly what it was like the summer before I left America. Those initial emails, the excitement, the trepidation. The realization that my options were a) go to grad school, do the same thing I'd been doing for the past four years, or b) go to China. Do something new. I circl…
"You need to understand," Walter said, lighting a cigarette. "Chinese love is real love."
"And American love isn't?" Nick said.
"Western love," Walter said, "is not real love. Not in the Chinese sense. It's not. Their love is deeper, truer."
"Yeah," Nick said, "I can see what you mean."
He could too. One night at dinner he had casually remarked that he had worn holes in a pair of socks. The next day his g…
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Travis