Roughly half-way down the list of things that expats in china are most often asked by folks back home is some variation of “what’s the health care system like?” I’ve visited enough Chinese hospitals and clinics to provide the answer that everyone kind of expects (“cheap” [for an expat], chaotic, highly efficient, not to ‘western’…
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May Day 2003: SARS memories for a swine flu present, pt. 2
[Part I in this series, including photos of SARS-era airport health screenings, can be found here.] News reports to the effect that Mexico is largely being shut down for the long May Day Holiday have, once again, put me in mind of SARS and 2003. May 1, 2003, marked my first Chinese May Day, and…
Don’t sneeze at others: SARS memories for a swine flu present
Now that swine flu hysteria is close to full bloom, I dug into the old photo archive and pulled up this classic set of instructional posters from SARS-era Shanghai. For a couple of months during Winter/Spring 2003, these were pasted everywhere – every spare wall (anybody out there remember if these showed up in other…
Visa Madness All Over Again.
Moments ago, I received a phone call from the organizers of a major industry conference and exhibition scheduled for Beijing in late May. For the sake of the people involved, I’m not going to name the conference or the industry, except to note that it is a very, very big industry employing many, many Chinese…
Fresh Eyes and Missing Faces
Among longer-term expatriates in China I think there’s a bit of a tendency to downplay – or downright denigrate – the observations made by first-time visitors and newcomers. I’m not immune to this tendency. Indeed, I think the worst offenders might be members of my own cohort: turf-sensitive journalists and writers. Quite frankly, I can’t…
The Fox News All Pirate Review.
This morning, a brief moment of culture shock when I read that Fox News’s Roger Friedman was fired for downloading, and reviewing, a copy of the yet-to-be-released summer blockbuster, Wolverine. If my American readers don’t feel similar shock at this relatively minor news, I suspect that – unlike me – they haven’t spent most of…
Love in the Time of Migrants
I recently received an email from an expatriate friend involved in a cross-cultural relationship in one of my favorite Chinese cities. I asked, and received permission to publish this passage, but only with name excised, and as a stand-alone, no comment. So, without further ado: Often, I think, I love the places from which X…
Useful Phrases for a Lost Shanghai
[updated with a few more phrases … I couldn’t help myself.] This afternoon, while researching a topic wholly unrelated to Shanghai dialect, I somehow landed upon Useful Phrases in the Shanghai Dialect (1908), a lost treasure from a lost Shanghai (click for an enlargement). Published in 1908 by the American Presbyterian Mission Press (which, apparently,…
So what’s a nice Newsweek editor like you doing, moonlighting as a Shanghai playwright?
Cut to my friend Megan Shank, the Shanghai-based, soon-to-be former editor of Newsweek Select (the recently axed Chinese-language edition of Newsweek). Of all the journalists that I know, Megan’s job is/was the most challenging: namely, writing, editing, and translating Chinese and English language content for a major news weekly, while managing a staff. And somehow,…
And finally, the British Foreign Office on the Alleged Ningbo Kidnapping.
Of the many pieces of advice that I’ve been given in China, perhaps the most curious was one of the earliest: Namely, if you ever find yourself in a tight spot, don’t count on foreign service officers to get you out of it. Fortunately, I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to test…