So obviously I haven’t been updating much recently. Insert standard “I’ve been awful busy with work / side projects / taking on freelance work at insultingly low pay” boilerplate here.
One of the things that I’ve been busying myself with is my weekly column in Chinese for the 珠海特区报 Zhuhai News. They don’t seem to be [...]
bokane.org
Longer Pieces —
Category Archives: Longer Pieces
i <3 china
The Eight Hots and the Eight Nots
From Xinhua English comes my favorite sentence of the day:
“How could that boiler be a cremation furnace?” Zhang refuted.
(For what it’s worth, I think this article is probably true - there’s no evidence supporting the claims that the Chinese government has an anti-FLG concentration camp at Sujiatun. I’ve dealt with the Epoch Times/Far-Loon Goons [...]
my air conditioner
My apartment appears to have been designed by a person who has never lived in an actual apartment, only seen glossy magazine photographs.
When I toured the place, I was especially impressed by the kitchen — large enough to actually cook in, unlike most Chinese kitchens. It was only after I moved in that I found [...]
jon and rebecca
I’ll be moving back to Beijing on 9/25, and there’ll be more posts about that in due course.
My friends Jon and Rebecca were married today at the Art Alliance, off of Rittenhouse Square. Here’s the speech I gave, as well as I can remember it:
I’ve known Jon since preschool, since we were in diapers. I [...]
a mizzouse in the hizzouse
I have a mouse.
I’d say that I have mice, but the idea of there being more than one mouse bothers me so much that I find myself rounding down: I have a mouse. It seems to live in the basement under my apartment, and to infiltrate my territory through the spot under my radiator.
This is [...]
chengdu (1)
(Translated from a Chinese entry on 出于不俗.)
Pick a city, any city, and Chinese people will tell you it has the most beautiful girls in all of China. Harbin girls, with their Manchu blood, will brave subzero temperatures to wear whatever strikes their fancy; beautiful ice queens, they are without question the most magnificent girls in [...]
new year’s eve
Kun, suffering from a mean-ass cold and lacking any sense of smell, had us booked into a profoundly shitty 招待所 flophouse at Qianmen which looked kind of like a rabbit warren and smelled strongly of mildew. We stayed there the first night - my plane got into Beijing at 10:30 on the night of the [...]
my peugeot
(This entry is adapted and rewritten from a Chinese post of mine on 出语不俗, a new blog by students of Chinese as a foreign language.)
Let me make a recommendation here: if you’re reading this late at night, and you have a bicycle, turn off the computer, go outside, get on your bike, and ride. Biking [...]
damn the Man
Lately I’ve become fascinated with classical Chinese protest poetry.
There’s a great book out called 中国文人的非正常死亡 (”The Unnatural Deaths of Chinese Literati”) which follows the cases of Chinese writers, poets, and historians who pissed off the wrong eunuch and subsequently found themselves exiled, castrated, tortured, or minus a head.
It starts with the story of Sima Qian [...]
herbsttag
The apartment building I’m living in is a nice, quiet, grad-studenty old pile near the University of Pennsylvania campus. It’s on a tree-lined street, further down which are houses which, if not actually fraternally-affiliated, have at least got frat-like activity going on. When you walk down the street on recycling day, you see blue plastic [...]