Tag: china

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in china

few things are more stupid than a mob

shanghaiist published today the story of an american volunteer teacher that was attacked last sunday, when exiting carrefour on zhuzhou (hunan). below is the letter sent by one of his colleagues to the media:

Last night [Editor’s note: Sunday, Apr 20] around 7pm my friend was attacked by a mob of about 150 people outside the Carrefour in Zhuzhou, Hunan (near his placement site). When leaving Carrefour some of the crowd started shouting at him and he tried to say he didn’t have anything to do with the Olympics, but 3 men started to push him and then he was hit in the back of the head at least 3 times.
He started to run, and the mob chased him. He jumped into a cab, but the mob surrounded the car and started shaking and rocking it. The cab driver was shouting at him to get out. Then they started hitting the car. The crowd was shouting “kill him! kill the Frenchman.” He called the Field Director while in the back of the car. The cab driver abandon the car when he saw police coming.
Two police made there way though the mob and managed to drive the cab away. The Field Director alerted the Director Shu of the Hunan Department of Education. The police got him another cab and he took it from Zhuzhou to the field director’s home in Changsha. He spending the night here in Changsha and is likely leaving China as soon as possible.

[My colleague] is only 22, an American (not French), and a volunteer teacher. He graduated from Boston Collage less than 10 months ago. If he can be attacked anyone can be. The situation in central china is becoming much worse very quickly. James has been cut up pretty badly by the glass and the people trying to grab him.

I didn’t think the situation and protests were anything to worry about before now, but if the mob had gotten him outside of the cab he could have easily been killed.

Foreigners need to be more aware that this is a real danger and MUCH more careful around the protests here in central china.

Im also sending this letter to the embassy.
People need to be more much careful.

me too, i also hadn’t given these boycotts and protests much thought. now? honestly, as a caucasian-big-eyed-easy-to-spot foreigner, i feel threatened.

i find myself mentally rewinding stupid sentences in mandarin, such as “i’m not french, i’m portuguese, portugal gave macau to china, so we’re friends!”. as if i could tame the stupidity of a mob with my impressive mandarin skills. both sad and pathetic. *sigh*

here’s hoping the olympics come and go quickly. 125 days left.

Categories
just life

1 year in china (一年在中国)

1 year in china and a lot of mixed feelings. hard to measure how much we fit here, with so many dramatic ups and downs, like cosine waves or bipolar periods.

yesterday, for instance. a bulldozer on a construction site accidentally hit a small brick wall by the sidewalk. p. was passing by on his bike when it happened and got caught under it. he’s cool, just scratches, bruises, a smashed bike and a dirty coat. nothing some ligaments and a lot of love won’t cure. could have been so much worse…

it makes you think, right? more than a year in china, today we’re celebrating each other and taking it easy. that’s it.

Categories
foooood in china

remember the kumquats?

last time i went to portugal, my parents proudly showed me the progress of their “tiny clementina’s tree”. it’s a cute little tree that they purchased way before i came to china, but to which i never paid much attention. and it turns out that it wasn’t clementines that tree was growing – it was kumquats!! lots of them! i was in shock, and incredibly happy to be putting my new asian knowledge to work! :)

but this, i think, is something we don’t see in portugal (or europe) so often. they’re called pomelo, or youzi (柚子) in mandarin.

pomelo peeling

in china they’re on display on every supermarket (both fresh and candied) or street fruit stand and they look like green-yellowish oversized lemons (hence their latin name, citrus maxima). inside, there’s a really thick rind that you need to remove completely to reach the juicy pulp.

inside!

they taste not as tart as lemon, and not as sweet as an orange, but with hints of both… it’s probably closer to grapefruit, now that i think about it, only sweeter. and oh-so-adictive!!
give it a try if you find it around!

ready

on the next episode of china fruit series, the mini-mango! stay tuned! :P

Categories
in china photography

hanzillion: a zillion hanzi out there

hanzillion is a (recently started) photo project*, a collection of the zillion hanzi, or chinese characters, found on the streets of china.
it works as my homework: when i hunt for them, my photographic memory starts to remember their strokes and forms. which i desperately need to do, since i have at least some 3000 to go before i can read a newspaper…

and yet, foreign as 99.9% of these characters still are to me, i can’t but marvel at their mystery, different typographies and simple beauty. it’ll be a work in progress, for a very long time.

* i just can’t seem to get enough of them!

Categories
in china

whatever he’s been drinking, i want some of that too!

There are many people studying Chinese now. I hope that all of you reporters, and the other ladies and gentlemen in attendance, can take up the study of Chinese. I believe that Chinese is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn. Otherwise, how can you explain why 1.3 bllion people have chosen it as their mother tongue?

said by china’s foreign minister, mr. yang jiechi in a press conference this morning.

i have a class in half an hour, am struggling to remember a dozen characters and starting to feel like i want to kill someone. because, you know, it’s so simple!

(from danwei.)