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 …
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…
I first heard of MandMX.com back about a year and a half ago when they featured Lost Laowai in a comic of theirs. So when Magnus, the "M" of MandMX, contacted me to let me know they'd compiled their large collection of bilingual, China-themed comics into a new book, I was excited to get my hands on it.
Dubbed with the quirky moniker "Electric Voices and Stinky Tofu", The book is an illustrated journey of ah-ha mom…
While it's not new (but new to me), here is an interesting talk on C-SPAN by Peter Hessler, best known as the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze and Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China. Hessler does a great job of reminding us (even several years since this talk) that despite its massive amount of change, when you get outside of the first and second tier cities, China is still a whole different …
I ran across an article at Found in China entitled Chai Ling: then and now, which made mention of Philip J Cunningham, author of a new book called Tiananmen Moon.
Over the years I've seen an article here or there about Cunningham, but had no idea he was so intimately involved in the protest, being one of the few foreigners to have marched with the students to on May 4. Tiananmen Moon captures that march, as we…
When China shifted its view on food subsidies this week, it was considered a major about face for a country that has been open to free trade for the last 30 years.
According to writer Naomi Klein in the conclusion of her book The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism, this turn is happening because China and its people are recovering from the "economic shock therapy" that the government put the people th…
Since it's the May Labour Day holiday in China this week, lots of Chinese are out traveling, and since I hate crowds I am not. What I did spend my first day of the three day holiday doing was finishing up Rob Gifford's great book China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power (Bloomsbury Publishing).
Gifford's book isn't your typical story about China's rise. There isn't a lot about Shanghai and there is…
For all those Chinese parents looking to get their kids into Harvard or Yale, they should take their noses out of those how-to-books writen by parents of successful students and instead read the biography of one of their countrymen. Yung Wing's My Life in China and America (China Economic Review Publishing) is the biography of China's first graduate from Yale -- way back in 1854.
But Yung isn't a guy to just rest …
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