As most everyone with Internet, cable, a radio or a newspaper knows by now – there was a terrible shooting at Virginia Tech University yesterday where a man shot and killed 32 people, injuring 15 others. What’s quickly coming to light is that the killer was very likely a 25-year-old Chinese man in the US …Read More
Time and again, I find the things I enjoy most about my job have little to do with teaching and everything to do with the absurdities I confront in the classroom. I wonder sometimes if this makes me a poor educator, but I don’t linger on it. My students have no books, their teacher has …Read More
The big news in China the past couple weeks has been about Western fast food chains (McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut) underpaying their staff in China – particularly the part-timers. The issue was sparked by accusations from China’s top trade union that McDonald’s was underpaying their employees (Reuters/China Daily), in some places by almost half, …Read More
Just a quick note to say that Lost Laowai now has its own official group on Facebook. If you’re a member of the popular social networking site, be sure to join the group of fellow lost laowai! Come see who else is a member, put faces to names around the China blogsphere (yikes!), ask questions …Read More
I’m not a timid man. Generally speaking I don’t get overtly nervous in most situations. However, any time I see the financial protection services folk, clad in their somewhat comical blue combats, and armed with a tube of a gun, I get shaky. These guys, whose job it is to protect transfers of money between …Read More
I was just reading Yale Professor Robert Schiller’s article Thrifty China, Spendthrift America, which explains the apparent discrepancy of the saving rate in America versus what’s occuring in China. While I cannot provide as indepth an economic analysis as the learned professor has made, I would like to touch upon some of the points he …Read More
UPDATE May 12/09: While this solution may still work, if you are in China for any length of time, we recommend getting yourself hooked up with a Virtual Private Network (VPN). For a super-fast and versatile solution, check out WiTopia. If their inexpensive yearly fee is too much for you, give the slightly slower (but …Read More
Living in China brings with it a number of occasions where most can do nothing but scratch their heads and say “WTF?” However, largely by the help of the English-language China blogsphere, we’ve started to create a dictionary that can assist in putting words to the weird, definitions to the disarray and captions to the …Read More
One of the (few) benefits of moving into an apartment inherited from a fellow expat is that occasionally they leave books behind. English-language reading material is not difficult to find in China, but stories that delve into the Chinese condition more than the State-approved classics are absent in the bookstores and often guarded by their …Read More
China’s economy got off to a shaky lunar new year with Tuesday’s stock market plunge in Shanghai, which saw a fall of 9%, which then triggered the worst trading day in the US since 9/11. Although yesterday’s (Wednesday) activity saw ‘Shanghai A shares’ gain some of their previously lost value (as well as the important …Read More
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 …Read More
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 …Read More
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