so now china is putting new taxes on disposable wooden chopsticks. some other things too, with the idea of helping environmental issues, which is good. those disposable chopsticks are EVERYwhere in china. every vendor on the street, of course, will give you a new pair with every bag of fried rice or whatever. and no way would they ever be good for ( Read more... )

china. is so. weird.

today, yahoo tells me that they're banning tv showings of cartoons combining live action and animation. my highlight of the article? "One such film, 'Babe,' was earlier banned in China on the grounds that animals don't talk."

i watched the opening ceremony for the olympics tonight. my family's always been pretty into the olympics (my dad contributes money to the national olympic committee every year), so i grew up watching pretty much anything of it they showed on tv. when i finally got a cabbage patch doll as a little girl, i named her mary lou after that year's gold ( Read more... )

i'm so a memorabilia junkie. i'm going to end up with at least three big fat scrapbooks of china stuff. plus three binders of notes from my students. plus six bunches of namecards they filled out for me. plus like 15 10-15 minute vcds of pictures/videos. and let's not even get into my cache of really chinese-y things (from clocks to cell phone ( Read more... )

a general warning: all books about china are depressing. i'm reading red azalea right now, a memoir from the cultural revelution. depressing ( Read more... )

one: i subscribed to get links from yahoo to stories from the past day about china every day. here's what the links usually are ( Read more... )

agh! there's been a mining cave-in in a city in china where i've visited and have friends. it was in xingtai, where margaret (who i've often mentioned) lives. or where her family does, anyway. 20 dead, more injured. i'll have to email her to ask about it. so in honor of xingtai, i'll post a picture of that city.


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so i don't know if you remember me mentioning the size of shijiazhuang, where i lived last year. china_maya provided an interesting stat ( Read more... )

sometimes i just get really keyed up about china. about its past, its present, its future. it just... kills me. for 100 years there, from say 1876 to 1976, ( you did not want to live in china )

happy national day in china!


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