“Freshman?” Jack said. “The first I taught freshman English, all the girls came up to me after class and asked if they could come home and fuck me.”
…and we never had another group dinner.Read More
A great capture from the very talented Poland-born, Chengdu-based photographer Michal Pachniewski. In his words: “I was just about to take the picture when she stopped me for a second. She took of her red hat, combed her hair and posed for me. Sweet moment.”Read More
Seven years of my life are gone. Looking back, it doesn’t seem that long, but I guess it was a long time. I always find myself nagged by a single, ugly feeling: that I wasted my time. That no matter what I did, I never used it wisely enough. For all the stress my rebirth in China brought, there was a lot it did away with. I had time plenty to write a novel, to learn a programming language, hell to learn a real language. What did I do?
The ‘what ifs’, those are the worst feelings. Those are the ones that haunt you. I read somewhere that you will regret your virtues more than your vices. I can’t say that I disagree with that. There are things I did when I was younger that I felt horrible about at the time, but as I grow older, I don’t feel so bad anymore. Maybe it’s the positive you can draw out of even the worst situations…or hell, maybe it is just getting older. Wondering what more you could have done.
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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 …Read More
Those first few years were the worst. You enter a period in your life where you can’t say for sure what you’re doing or even who you are. Each day the same as the last, they blur together like a flipbook. You can only see flashes of what you did, what you were. Little isolated fragments that do nothing to illustrate what happened and everything to add to the mystery.
“Why do you come to China?”, my students ask me, which is pretty much “What’s a nice laowai like you doing in a place like this?”. Well…I suppose I came here for a better life. I suppose. It’s hard to say. It’s hard to know what I was thinking. Look at it like this: I was treading water in the middle of the ocean, waiting for a boat to come by.
China just happened to be the first.
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I was a foreign teacher in China for seven years.
They say life is too short. Well, then they ought to come to Wuhan, China.Read More
Here’s a great short animated film called “Miss Puff’s Goldfish Bowl” by Beijing-based director Skin 3 (皮三) and his team at Hutoon Studio. The melding of animation with real scenery and people is great — somewhat reminiscent to Linklater‘s “A Scanner Darkly” and “Waking Life”, though in this the protagonist and major characters are all …Read More
Sometimes conversations in China turned sour. The risk substantially increased after the novelty of being somewhere new wore off and culture shock set in. Here it was very easy to idealize my beautiful country of golden fields and azure skies, and criticize my new home in the City of Perpetual Gloom. You can try staying …Read More
An intriguing photo of a Jiefang Lu street sign in Sanya by Django Malone. Anti-pinyin radicals (no pun intended) or just random graffiti?Read More
I do not know if I will be able to cope with the weather and culture shock. I had spent the whole summer in America grilling, drinking good beer, updating my Facebook account, and stewing about returning to the Middle Kingdom. Two weeks back in country and it was raining girls and I kept forgetting …Read More
When I first saw the title of this post, “Chinese Red Army performing ‘Beat It’“, I had assumed it was just the latest attempt at a mass MJ viral tribute. Which I guess it sort of is, just with less criminals. Either way, I laughed my bits off. The Er Hu solo around the 2:50 …Read More
If you’re heading to the Shanghai Expo and don’t feel like spending your day under the sun in line for one of the biggie pavilions; head over to the (surely cool) Iceland Pavilion, where you can rub elbows with Miss World 2005 Unnur Birna Vilhjálmsdóttir. According to the Iceland Expo site, Unnur is heading up …Read More
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