It’s the middle of peach season, and China has some of the juiciest and sweetest peaches in the world. Here, they are called 水蜜桃 (shui mi tao), or “water honey peaches.” As a peach lover, I find them to be irresistible, but a traumatic experience a couple of years ago has deterred me from messing […]
Weather: Everyone experiences it. In addition to our humanity and our egos, it is a common denominator that binds us together. But we also experience it differently. In the case of extremely large hail, we in the United States might compare the size of hailstones to, say, golf balls, as this recent Gawker article did: […]
Do you ever get tired of hearing about those South China Sea disputes between China on the one hand and basically every other country in Southeast Asia on the other? Do you ever just want to know who’s right and who’s not? Well, wonder no more: China has drawn a new map of China, in […]
The World Cup has begun, and my mind has been consumed by soccer. So, in that respect, I direct you to an excellent story in the Economist about the sport and how it is followed/played less religiously in the four biggest countries in the world (by population) than elsewhere. On this front, the United States […]
Way back at the beginning of April, one of our best Chinese friends graciously invited Boyfriend and me to his hometown for a long weekend. He is from Gaobeidian (高碑店), a “city” about two hours from Beijing by bus in the neighboring province of Hebei. I say “city” because even though my friend says it […]
Back in 2013, I decided that 2014 was going to be the Year of Reading Books. I had all these books I wanted to read jotted down on random scraps of paper, or in some virtual notepad on my laptop or phone, or on my Amazon wishlist, and I realized that the only way I […]
With a new week comes a new ban: Four American TV shows are the first to be removed from Chinese video sites in the Communist Party’s latest effort to rein in online speech. While films and televisions have always been tightly controlled, the Internet was almost untouchable, and video sites such as Sohu and iQiyi […]
I hope you enjoyed my three-part story about the time I went to get a facial. I wrote it partly because I thought it was yet another silly China misadventure (still going on them even after living here for almost five years), and partly to reflect on this facet of China — a China that […]
The WSJ’s China Real Time blog has a fun article on Chinese words in the English lexicon (there are few compared to other languages, such as French, Italian and Yiddish), based on a Xinhua report about Chinese buzzwords that have made it onto the great linguistic archive … Urban Dictionary. Seriously, the Chinese state media […]
I haven’t been terribly creative since coming back to Beijing after the Chinese New Year holiday. My mind is overflowing with ideas, but it’s hard to have time and not feel lazy at the same time. As such, my culinary experiments haven’t been many. Still, here’s some stuff I have managed to make: Zha jiang […]