A short documentary that looks at the atypical experiences of foreigners in China, including the excitement of arrival, the challenges of staying here long-term, and finding acceptance or choosing to leave. The film is a masters degree project at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, in Suzhou, and was produced by Krystal Soroka, Bryan Song and Danny Abbasi.Read More
An article by Mawuna Remarque Koutonin in the Guardian last Friday has been making the rounds. The piece asks, “why are white people expats when the rest of us are immigrants?” and concludes without much nuance that it’s white racial supremacy at work. I disagree, mostly.Read More
Possibly coming to a TV or Youku stream near you is a new sitcom called No Pets or Foreigners, which follows the misadventures of Melvin and Larry, two Westerners in Beijing, as well as their brusque Chinese landlord Mr. Li and his materialistic daughter Lingling.Read More
Student Jake Gaba spent 3.5 months (100 days) in China studying Mandarin on a Dartmouth College study abroad program. To catalogue the journey he recorded himself dancing to Bruno Mars’ “Treasure” across China.Read More
Beijing police have announced the foreigner who originally cried “fraud” after being accused by a woman of hitting her with his motorbike will be fined, detained and deported. The incident occurred on December 2 and immediately went viral across Chinese social media. Initially netizens appeared to favour the foreigner’s story, as tales of (fake) accident …Read More
A video making the rounds, lacking much in the way of details, shows a foreigner being held by two Chinese after what is presumed to be a dispute over a fare. After being hit several times, and being unable to get the cabbie to release his shirt, the foreign man slips out of his shirt …Read More
Much to the chagrin of my dear hubby, I’ve been watching at least one Gangnam Style parody video a day. Hey, it keeps me happy. A Gangnam Style a day keeps the bad China days away! Here’s my new favorite: Laowai Style!Read More
Because living in China didn’t feel uneasy enough, a new draft law currently under review will require any foreigners staying longer than 6 months in China to have their fingerprints taken by the Entry & Exit Bureau and kept on file. China Daily: Foreigners who stay in China for more than six months will be …Read More
I caught this video on Hao Hao Report. Basically, Vahram Diehla is a 23-year-old American who is pleading for some advice on how to quickly raise some money to get the hell out of China.
According to his blog he’s working up in Dalian as an English teacher, but the ESL racket has lost its luster and a woman on the other side of the ocean is pulling at his heart strings.
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I realize I’m about a decade late posting a review of Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, but it was only recently that I finally took the time to read it. I can’t be certain why it took me so long to pick up Hessler’s seminal work, but I think it was …Read More
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 …Read More
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 …Read More
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