13
posts labeled china
10.08.2006
WalMart is my reliable early-warning system for Chinese holidays. Three weeks or so before any main event, various special exhibits start popping up, and more and more floor space of the store is devoted to lanterns or or whatever the item of interest might be, similar to the Halloween and...
Hong Kong
10.06.2006
When it comes to the future, we were robbed. Raised in anticipation of the new millennium, we let the grown-ups fill our ears with sweet promises even as they failed to do any of the basic or applied science needed to make them a reality. The year 2000 was supposed to bring us flying cars, flying...
So You Want To Be A China Sex Blogger
08.31.2006
Sometime this May there appeared a weblog called , detailing the adventures of a British expatriate seducing various ex-students from his English classes. The blogger, who called himself chinabounder, was in his mid-thirties and had been living in China for five years. His sexual experience pr...
Five Friendlies
08.15.2006
The Five Friendlies ( ) are the 2008 Olympic mascots whose reign of terror over Beijing will soon spread to all of China and then the world. Their cutesy doubled names collectively spell out " ", or "Beijing welcomes you". The air outside any metro station is thick with the cries of merchants...
I Spy
08.05.2006
My only in a police van had been marred by a somewhat tight suspension and a feeling of vague unease connected with the large number of guns sliding back and forth under the seats, whanging against the van walls. The Beijing police van, by comparison, was an oasis of comfort and safety....
Black Letter Days
07.26.2006
In my college days I remember a few close encounters with the , a postwar French literary genre created by French authors who wanted to score with as many chicks as film directors did. My memory now glazes over a lot of the texts, but I do remember the books dispensed with plot and linear tim...
The Day That Nothing Happened
06.05.2006
As the excellent special on the company explains, the opening of free trade with China had approximately the same effect on Wal-Mart's retail business as the parallel introduction of steroids did on American baseball. The retailer swelled to enormous size by creating an ex...
Down The Yangtze
01.23.2003
You can (more borrowed pictures) at any desired level of comfort. At the top of the top end are the foreigner-only custom liners, a gorgeous deluxe riverboat in the shape of a giant dragon, or one of several sleek wedding-cake cruise ships without even a hint of scary Asianness to...
The Three Gorges
01.17.2003
The gorges spectacular. I had wanted to wait until I had some photos to post, since it seems a little reckless to rely on just my breathless prose style. But the pictures have been slow in coming, and time is passing. Thank goodness for the Internet: there are of the Three Gorges to...
Sex in Shanghai
12.13.2002
If you are looking for the "Sex In Shanghai" blog, you are in the wrong place. You can find a cached copy of it Are you a dusty old fetishist interested in Asian women, medical fantasies, and the delights that only a lover of a certain age can offer? And are you are interested i...
A Tour Of Chongqing
12.07.2002
As a college junior, I spent a semester living in Paris, occupying a prim little room in the 15th arrondisement. My French landlady, the widow of a Hungarian nobleman, was a decorous older woman with a complete collection of green Michelin guides to the various provinces of France. Apart from the f...
On Haggling
12.04.2002
"Hello!" is Chinese for . Alternatively, you may also hear the phrase "Rolex!", which means . A proper response to "Hello!" and "Rolex!" is to say "bú yào!", which means . To begin the haggle dance, point to something...
Letter From Sichuan
11.20.2002
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