Lao Shi

Shanghai is like a bowl of spaghetti – a tangle of streets and alleyways piled on top of one another in a big mess, flying highways above, subway and pedestrian tunnels below and a healthy sprinkling of cabs everywhere. Beijing spreads out like a huge grey stain – a grid of humongoloid blocks where life […]

Has news of this reached the states? On December 26th an earthquake measuring 7.1 or 7.2 (depending on source) hit Taiwan, damaging over half of the fiber-optic cables bringing internet access to Southern Asia.
Hong Kong, parts of China, India and Singapore won’t have complete access for the next week or two. Yesterday I […]

In New York, typical school party fare was pizza, rice and beans, chicken, pasta salads – the usual American stuff. At today’s Christmas party I was treated to:
Korean sushi rolls, which were filled with ham and veggies instead of fish.
Warm peanut milk with glutinous rice balls and peanuts, which tasted kind of like […]

On December 18th, the State Council (whatever that is) issued the calendar of holidays for 2007, including days off for New Year – both the Chinese New Year in February, and the Roman Calendar New Year on January 1st. The schedule dictates that Tuesday, January 2nd and Wednesday, January 3rd will be given off, with […]

Walking down the main tourist drag of Nanjing Lu, from People’s Square to The Bund, I expect to be jostled by crowds and bombarded by hawkers looking to push their wares – usually fake watches or the cheap trinket du jour, which for the past few months has been skates that attach to your shoes […]

Picture this: Sunday, late afternoon, cold but clear; you’re on your way home from the Shanghai Museum when you see it creeping over the tree line and heading towards you like some special effect from an apocalyptic disaster-of-the-week tv movie with a mind of its own: a billowing cloud of nasty black smoke.

After a brief […]

An excerpt (un-proofed) from the journal of one of my students, speaking about a combined session of girls and boys Oatmeal. Oatmeal is the youth Bible study group – apparently boys and girls are usually separate, I guess to keep them focused on the Lord’s good word instead of their neighbor’s good legs:
So yesterday’s oatmeal […]

The New York Times featured an article on Tibet in the Travel section today.
Tibet has achieved such a great amount of buzz among Chinese tourists that in September I heard CCTV (the government controlled system of television stations) advise travelers to delay going to Tibet until the current travel boom slowed down. The Times article […]

Every so often – certainly not every day or even every week – my students make strange comments or references to September 11th. Close to the actual day, some of them asked me questions about whether I was in New York and what it was like. I could understand this. Stranger have been the times […]

Instead of showing Dead Poets Society in class on Thursday, I taught a lesson on censorship in which I retold the story of the film and shared the administration’s reason for deeming it inappropriate for the classroom (though I kept out the part about the parents complaining so as not to sow unrest among the […]