Ryan Sholin in Santa Cruz (how I miss it so) has a link-worthy list (disclosure: I’m on it). I’m not sure whether to call this a meme, since there’s no actual tagging involved, but I’ll pass it around nonetheless. Here’s my list of five sites doing something right this week:
It looks like there was a redesign since last I checked. The big tag cloud of countries is gone, replaced by pull-down menus and a cool map in the corner. Mouse over the two-color version and it melts into a satellite view. Neat-o. The core of the site is the same though, and that’s what deserves the attention. There’s still no better place to get first-hand news from the less media-saturated parts of the world.
I found these folks a few months back, around the time they launched. Giving away subscription revenue to charity is a clever gimmick, and the content itself holds up. What I especially like here is that the online component keeps going between bi-monthly issues, giving me reason not to forget about the mag during those intermittent eight weeks. Check out the blog–they call it Fieldwork–and their videos on YouTube. If I were
clever myself I’d be sending them a pitch for something. Here’s a recent piece, with a China connection to boot:
Media Storm
Wow, these guys are good. Watch this piece, produced for the Council on Foreign Relations:
Your Daily Awesome
As the site’s author puts it: “Chas Bowie’s attempt to curate the most fascinating and beautiful human efforts into one simple website, one day at a time.” Can’t say it any better myself.
And last, a site that could turn into something great. My friend Alex (in Beijing, not Dalian) is renovating the “Upfront” section of That’s Beijing. I hope that includes some reworking of the web presentation, which I find too hard to navigate and straining to read right now. It should come out cool, whatever Alex does with it.
Speaking of possibilities, I should have a big new project to announce in a few weeks, something hopefully worthy of similar lists as this. Stay tuned!
Teaching Online Journalism has a likewise link-worthy list. Following both examples, I’m not tagging anyone, but by all means, add your own list and I’ll link out.
Things to buy in Dalian: Designer clothes, fake designer clothes, new mom
New school clothes: 200 RMB
New mom to go with your new clothes: 50 RMB per month
New reputation: Priceless
There’s a feel-good teeny-bopper movie somewhere in this story: Here in Dalian, we find Wang Pingping, a middle schooler whose mother just couldn’t hang with the cool parents.
According to Pingping, her mother likes to wear casual clothing, which outlines her stout figure. Her daughter once suggested her mom should wear more professional outfits, only to get bitter response from her mom: “You brat! You’re picking on my clothing. Just mind your own business, and leave the rest for me to worry!”
Since then, the school’s regular parents meeting have been a huge concern for Pingping. Not only did her mother not dress well, but was also nosy, asking about other parents’ salaries and other students’ pocket money. And so Pingping felt her mom was not welcomed both by the students and parents.
Pingping tried very hard to impress other students so that they would forget about her mom, but the monthly parents’ meeting was still unavoidable. She claimed she had a lot of nightmares about her mom’s buffoon acts in parents’ meetings.
The solution: Pingping paid her friend’s aunt 50 yuan ($6.47) a month to fill in at school functions. When the real Mama Wang found out, her daughter didn’t mince words: “Please consider your dress and manners from now on - it’s not only for your own good.”
Here’s a job offer for the desperate: Pretend to be a Chinese businessman’s mistress so his (understandably) irate wife can take a few whacks at you. (h/t Rick, via the Hao Hao Report)
“When the woman found out her husband had a mistress, she insisted on beating her up,” the Beijing Youth Daily said, citing the advertisement posted on a popular online jobs forum on sina.com.
More than 10 people had applied for the job, the newspaper said.
The “successful” candidate would be 35 and originally from northeastern China and would be paid 3,000 yuan ($400) per 10 minutes, it said.
I wonder how much damage the missus can do. Anybody want to go a few rounds?
The Santa Cruz Sentinel has a good multimedia feature today on one school’s efforts to get out of No Child Left Behind sanctions after three years of missing the mark. There are 2,218 California schools receiving federal penalties this year (source), and Branciforte sounds a lot like the schools I used to cover. It has a growing immigrant population that needs to learn English fast. Requirements are tightening. The school is struggling.
Why am I writing about education reform in my home state? you may be asking. Isn’t this a China blog? Yes. That it is. Halfway through the first slide show (via Ryan Sholin, who built it) is this choice turn of phrase from Kathy Sandidge, an English Language Development teacher:
I think people aren’t empathetic to what it means to be in another country, learning another language. If I talk to adults I say, ‘Pretend you’re in China. You’re sitting in a classroom and everything’s in Chinese. The culture is different. The expectations are different. The language is different. It’s all foreign.’
A year ago, I would have processed that quote differently. China is a big, scary, complicated and maybe threatening place when you’ve never been there, and more so if you, like too many in the States, have never left comfortable American shores (I’d been around Europe, but that’s beside the point). Once you’ve been here a while, it’s still a big, sometimes scary, always complicated but not quite so threatening kind of place, but in a different way.
This is a long way of saying: Living here changes the way I see the world.
Globalization and æ±‰å— don’t frighten me like they used to. Pollution and crowds, more so. This country has a way of tempting me to oversimplify things, then reminding me why that’s a bad idea.
I haven’t gone all the way through this thought, but it’s got my mind going in the just-after-midnight haze. So here’s tonight’s question for the blogosphere:
How a story is told can be as important as the story itself.
I arrived at the home of a student I tutor yesterday to find him attaching a silencer and laser sight to a far-too-real-looking plastic handgun. He rushed over to show me the toy he picked up for 15 RMB ($2) down the street; it fires 1 mm white pellets using compressed air. They sting at close range.
“Great,” I thought. “Another Korean kid with a gun.”
It’s an embarrassing thought, but it’s one that was hard to push away at first. The news out of Virginia Tech, where 33 people died this week, has been on my mind.
Something about living in China makes it easy to over-generalize: “It’s the Chinese way. We all hate the Japanese. What are Americans like?”
My Chinese teacher said this in class yesterday: “On April 16, a Korean killed 32 Americans.”
There’s a disturbing ring to that statement. The day before, the Chinese blogosphere was buzzing with the possibility of a Chinese perpetrator, maybe dumped by a girlfriend for a white guy. Was it Counterstrike? Or American gun culture? How did he manage to get a student visa? None of those questions are relevant now. (Check out the discussion over at the Peking Duck.)
Part of the blame for this uproar can be laid at the desk of Michael Sneed, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist who first reported the Chinese connection. State media gets a finger wag, too, for doing exactly what one might expect a government-controlled press in a country with identity issues to do. (Excellent post on Beijing Newspeak.)
Facts have emerged, showing Cho and a deranged and angry young man. The video he send NBC is unnerving.
The more we know about Cho—he was mentally ill, detained after harassing two female students, just plain mean—the less his ethnicity matters. Ethnicity is an easy identifier, but it’s a lousy explanation. There’s nothing Korean or Chinese or American about killing 32 innocent humans for only the most self-indulgent and contrived reasons. Cho was a sick fucker, unfortunately armed, and that’s about it.
I tend to believe that some folks just don’t fit in China. It causes endless unhappiness, with no real reward, for some, and in that case, maybe it’s time to move on. No reason to stay if you really don’t want to.
The same principal, I suppose, applies to food. In my stomach. Let’s say, last night.
Something in those a-bit-too-slimy clams or dry fish-like slices of brown meat just didn’t want to sit still last night, and I spent the small hours of the morning coaxing the poison out of my system. I’ll spare any more intimate details of the conversation with my maroon toilet (that, thankfully, is flushing this week), except to say it was vile and chunky.
Food poisoning came as a surprise, though, since the restaurant looked nice enough, and certainly clean. Eight months in this country and I’ve had no real health problems (this is me knocking on wood), so maybe this was coming. Looks like I’m not the only one, though. (h/t CDT).
Still, anybody says this is a China “rite of passage,” you’ve got an ass-kicking on the way.
It’s easy to pretend that being so far away is an isolating experience, that distance still matters and that one can hide from the world. That’s still true in a few places, but Dalian isn’t one of them.
I just got word of the Virginia Tech shooting; 33 are dead at last count, including the still-unidentified shooter.
I was a junior in high school when the Columbine shooting happened, almost exactly eight years ago. Some events, though far away, inevitably make people look around nervously and ponder the horrific possibilities of something closer. I spent this morning wondering if my brothers, both at big universities far from home, were really safe. It’s hard to push away those questions.
There’s a lot on this around the web. Rick has a good list, from which I gleaned this:
China could be taking a few cautious steps in the right direction on Sudan this week, urging Khartoum to accept a UN force to stem the killings in Darfur. Like China Redux says, Better late than never.
At least 200,000 people have died over the past four years, according to the AP, and another 2.5 million displaced. During that time, China has protected Sudan from calls for intervention. Beijing has strong business ties to the African pariah and a squeamishness toward violating other nations’ sovereignty.
The Olympics may have been the key, says a NYT/IHT piece. A campaign by Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg effectively held the games hostage:
Farrow, a UN good-will ambassador, has played a crucial role, starting a campaign last month to label the Games in Beijing the “Genocide Olympics” and calling on corporate sponsors and even on Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the Games, to exhort China publicly to do something about Darfur.
Credit for making Beijing budge goes beyond the two, I’m sure. Still, it’s good to see China stepping up. I was surprised, however, to see a post on Danwei criticizing Farrow and Spielberg:
But Farrow’s rhetoric and strategy are shameful. “Genocide” — like “rape” — isn’t a word to throw around carelessly, and whatever else might be said of the Chinese government’s dealings with the Sudan, China isn’t committing genocide in Darfur. Chinese businesses aren’t even collaborating — as IBM did with the Third Reich — or profiteering — as Swiss banks did during the Holocaust. What the Chinese are doing is buying Sudan’s oil.
And blocking deployment of UN peace keepers while Khartoum makes excuses. Let’s not forget that.
Farrow therefore condemns China for “bankrolling Darfu’s genocide,” but even this accusation fails. China isn’t giving the Sudan money for the purpose of killing people in Darfur; China is conducting business with a government that uses some of those business proceeds for despicable ends. The distinction is important: responsibility for Darfur must rest squarely on the shoulders of Sudan’s government. As such, calling the Beijing Games the “Genocide Olympics” is unforgivably irresponsible.
The post’s author, Maya Alexandri, then lumps on America for the Iraq war and says China’s involvement in Africa has generated “hand-wringing about the emergence of a Chinese superpower.” Interesting points. Relevant? No.
Whatever culpability the United States has for inaction, it is one shared with the rest of the world. China isn’t standing in the way of genocide, either, and it has leverage on Sudan that other nations do not. This is becoming a familiar scenario: China is the lynch pin of an international crisis, where it may have to choose between immediate economic gains and long-term global stability.
There is much happening with Darfur that is unforgivable. Calling out Beijing for protecting a genocidal regime is hardly one of them.
My friend Nik (better known as the Funky Mother on DalianXpat.com) posted a fascinating story on the expat forum that got me thinking. It seems the historically recent butchery of English, as it’s spoken by those who still have a queen, is the fault of those living at the very heart of that once-upon-a-time empire.
Who put the R in bath? Surely this is a trick question, you may think, there is no R in bath. But if you search hard enough in certain parts of Britain the rogue consonant is there - squatting erroneously between the A and the T.
So which linguistic criminals are to blame? The Americans? Nope. They may have been guilty of savagely stealing the U from honour, colour and glamour, and ruthlessly usurping poor S from its position among realise, organise and their lexical brethren so they could replace it with the rather radical Z, but we can’t pin this one on the English-speakers across the pond. If we want to uncover who really put the R in bath we need look no further than England’s great capital.
London, home of the Queen and the apparently “proper†English speakers, is actually to blame for the mutated pronunciation. According to an expert at the British Library, the Telegraph reports, the R sound in words such as laugh and bath only came about 150 years ago when Londoners adopted the trend into their speech. Apparently, the entire nation used the bath and “laff” pronunciations about 250 to 300 years ago – a tradition which is still alive and kicking in northern England. The south gradually adopted an “aa†sound which, over time, became the familiar “barth†of the ubiquitous London and Home Counties drawl of today.
I’m glad she acquits us Yanks. I spent most of February traveling with Britons, two from Devon and a Welsh woman living in Birmingham. Half our conversations devolved into “why do you keep talking about your underwear?” and whether various parts of an automobile actually belonged on elephants or Amish women.
It became a quasi-nationalistic thing after a while. Who invented the language? Who rescued who in which world war? Where did the Beatles come from? Stupid, all of it.
We’ve all really made a mess of this language, I must say. Much of my speech, I realize, has become a mish-mash of Cali slang and verbosity better suited to concealing meaning than conveying it.
Then again, being straightforward all the time can be so dull.
A priest is walking through a cemetery in Ireland on Easter Sunday, and he comes upon a man weeping over a tombstone.”Why did you have to die?” he sobs.
The priest approaches, seeking to comfort the aggrieved. “Dear sir,” he says, “is this your father you’re crying over?”
The man shakes his head and continues moaning: “Why? Why did you die?”
“Was it your brother then?” the priest persists.
“No,” the man sniffles. “Oh God why?”
The priest asks cautiously, “Could it be your son?”
The man calms for a moment. “No,” he says. “In truth, I never knew him.”
