A Chinese story:
At 8:40am I called her on her cell phone. “Are you headed off to work?” I asked.
“Sure am!” she laughed back.
Choking back a sob, I said to her, “Wen… I’m sorry.”
After a moment of stunned silence, she replied, “why are you apologizing to me?”
“It’s nothing,” I explained.
“Xiao Nuo, you…” she started, but I quickly hung up.
At ten minutes past noon I dialed her office number.
“Why isn’t your cell phone on?”
…
Micah recently did a summary of the Chinese Blogger Conference. Then he updated it with a link to Rebecca MacKinnon’s thoughts on the matter. Wow. I thoroughly enjoyed her post, and was glad to be able to read a condensed list of key ideas. I recommend you read her whole article (blocked in China), but here are some key quotes to represent what I considered the most interesting ideas:
One of the
Just in case your inner geek is the least bit curious about what went down at the Chinese Blogger Conference in Shanghai over the weekend, Micah offers a fairly extensive account.
So yes, I was curious how it went. Did I read Micah’s whole account? Yes. Do I wish I had gone? No. (I had to beat Shadow of the Colossus over the weekend! Man, that is a truly awesome, ground-breaking game.)
I think we can expect another …
Last Friday night my friend DJ Carl was spinning so I went to check his set out at La Fabrique with my girlfriend. While there a kind soul gave us tickets to see Scott Bond at DKD so we did that too. I learned a few things:
A girl can look pretty hot with her hair up and chopsticks in her hair.
The chopsticks in her hair are not actually to be called “chopsticks.” That would be silly. They are
My friend Wayne likes to come up with interesting questions and then pose them to his friends. His latest question was, “How do you make someone trust you?”
He posed this question to a male Chinese friend. That friend’s answer was:
There are two ways:
- You can tell that person all your secrets.
- You can give that person all your money.
Hmmm…
One of Wayne’s past questions can be found in the entry Versions of Truth.…
I recently received a new submission for the CBL called blog中文翻译 (“blog Chinese translation”). It doesn’t qualify to be listed on the CBL, as it’s almost entirely in Chinese, but it’s a good idea nonetheless. The author starts an entry with a link to an online English article, then translates it.
It could be very useful to Chinese readers as well as to advanced students of Chinese. The topics all seem to be geeky tech topics. I haven’t yet taken …
The other day I got in a taxi to discover that my driver was a pleasant middle-aged woman. Female taxi drivers are not exceedingly rare in Shanghai, but they’re not common, either. I was feeling gregarious, so I started chatting her up. (That’s one of the things I love about China… barring language barriers or extreme psychological blocks, foreigners can talk to pretty much any Chinese person about anything, and that person will be happy to respond.)
First I …
A while back I decided to try an experiment. I said that I would begin posting one entry every morning (China time), Monday through Friday. And I’ve been doing that, for over 14 weeks now. So how do I feel about it?
Well, it wasn’t that hard. My inspiration (or desire to write uninspired posts, as the case may be) comes in spurts, and during those times it’s pretty convenient to write up a bunch of posts and schedule …
John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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