Happy Qixi Festival Everyone! I wrote the following a couple of months ago but thought it was appropriate to share today, on Chinese Valentine’s Day! The Chinese equivalent of Valentine’s Day is known as Qixi Festival, which is held of the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. Qixi celebrates the story of the cowherd Read More
Category: blog post
Book Review: The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel by Maureen Lindley
The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel is a novelization of the life of Japanese spy Yoshiko Kawashima, who was also known as Eastern Jewel. While the book was interesting, it focused far too much on Yoshiko’s sexuality. The book’s description says: Peking, 1914. When the eight-year-old princess Eastern Jewel is caught spying on her father’s liaison Read More
Book Review – The Incarnations by Susan Barker
When I was at the HK Book Fair a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Susan Barker’s The Incarnations. The description reads: Beijing, 2008, the Olympics are coming, but as taxi driver Wang circles the city’s congested streets, he feels barely alive. His daily grind is suddenly interrupted when he finds Read More
It is Legal to Buy a Kidnapped Child in China
I had only been in China for a few months the first time someone told me I could buy a baby in China. I had told one of my new friends at our school in rural, northern Hunan about my dream of adopting a child in China. “Why bother with that?” she asked. “Just go Read More
Book Review: The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo
I recently finished reading The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo. It is a really fascinating book that I highly enjoyed and would recommend. The book’s description does not do the book justice. According to Amazon: Li Lan, the daughter of a respectable Chinese family in colonial Malaysia, hopes for a favorable marriage, but her father has Read More
Buying (Banned) Books and Getting Published at the Hong Kong Book Fair
This past weekend, Seth, Zoe, and I made our way to the Hong Kong Book Fair. The Hong Kong Book Fair is the largest book show in Asia, with over 500 vendors from over 30 countries and over 1 million guests. We had two purposes for our trip: finding a publisher and buying banned books. Read More
How I Met Your Father – Love in 1990s China
While watching the American TV show “How I Met Your Mother,” I asked my mom how she met my father. “Why do you want to know that? It is not romantic at all,” she asked. “Oh, come on, I just want to hear your story,” I replied. “I grew up in a family without much Read More
Rachel Dolezal's Appropriation of Adoption Language
If you haven’t heard of Rachel Dolezal, then you are one lucky duck. Dolezal made international headlines last week when it was revealed that she, a White woman, had spent the better part of a decade masquerading as a Black person and was even the chapter president of the Spokane, Washington branch of the NAACP. What Read More
The Big Con – Our Nightmare Saturday at the Guangzhou Comic Con *UPDATES at the end*
My husband Seth and I are big geeks, as everyone who knows us or has read this blog knows. We have gone to great lengths to recapture some of the geeky atmosphere we left behind in our old country. This has including visiting some pretty lame and poorly organized gaming and anime conventions around China. Read More
Living with Epilepsy in China
Recently, a man in Hubei was sentenced to life in prison for causing the deaths of four people when he crashed into a group of pedestrians after suffering from an epileptic seizure. Most of the comments in response to the article have centered around how stupid it was of the man to keep his illness Read More