Postcards from China » Assorted Fun

‘Best China Blogger’s Kids’ Halloween Costumes Award’ Goes To….

Mark Baker — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:47:19 +0000

At our Halloween Party last night, since most of our friends seem also to have daughters, the younger set’s costume stats read this way: Eight Disney Princesses (girls ages 3-6) and one Little Lamb (a four-month old boy).

Running through the post-Halloween list of China Blog entries this morning, though, the name “jellicle cat” caught my eye from the “Eye of Modok” feed and I just had to click on through.

Very cool: There are Modok’s daughters, ages six and nine, one done up as a Jellicle Cat from ALW’s “CATS” and the other in a disturbingly authentic-looking (meaning “Good job!”) “Corpse Bride” get-up. Great make-up work by Modok’s wife, Salomae. Seriously. I had to click through to their family photo gallery just for visual confirmation that there really is a cute and happy little girl in there behind the fangs and blood and dark sunken eyes. (There is).

I don’t want to steal that thunder, so go to the entry Happy Halloween 2006! yourself for the photos.

This gives me hope that next year one or both of my daughters will want to dress up as someone besides Cinderella. Or Belle. Or Sleeping Beauty. Or Ariel. Or Snow White.

At the very least, I think I’ll start to keep an eye out for Mulan costumes, but I’m really wondering how a pair of little matching Red Guard uniforms would go over….

How One China Blogger Averted My Mid-Life Crisis

Mark Baker — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 18:13:50 +0000

I turned 40 this year.

If that sounds “really old” to you, then I laugh in your general direction, because it’s not old–just ask my elders Mick Jagger, Brad Pitt, and Weird Al Yankovic–and because you’ll be here far sooner than you can possibly imagine.

But if turning 40 is something you too have been saddled with already, or will be soon, but neither wanted nor somehow even expected it, like a bout of mononucleosis on your honeymoon or a painfully ingrown toenail just before the big game, then this post is for you.

Turning 40 has brought with it some of those strange effects I’d heard about: Eyeing the Volvo in the garage and thinking, “You know, a Harley would fit there just as well. Maybe better.”; meeting other parents at the PTA meetings and thinking, “That nice lady in charge of the bake sale, Billy’s Mommy, I’ll bet she was quite the hellraiser back at the U.”; realizing that a number of the washed up “has been” Playboy Playmates are younger than oneself (which is even more shocking than years ago realizing some of the new ones were); and so on.

But anyway…a blog post written recently by a “young whippersnapper” living in China has just set the world right for me.

I keep a few “China Blog” aggregator feeds in my RSS reader, checking out all the entries by some authors and other posts here and there if the titles and first paragraphs draw me in. Lots of these blogs are written by twenty-something and early thirty-something chaps living it up in China, and sometimes I enjoy their thrills vicariously, occasionally harking back to my own “Good Old Days” in the P.R.C. with a tinge of envy. “Oh, to be 27, single, young, wild and free on the other side of the planet again…when everything in the world was perfect.”

Right.

But this latest post from China Blogger Meursault, a 25-year old professional translator from Britain with a BA in Chinese, now living in China, has flushed all the cells of mid-life crisis out of my system before they’ve had a chance to take root, reminding me of everything I do not miss about life at that age, with his post called “Yellow Wings Vs My girlfriend’s flatmate,” which would be better titled, as 花崗齋之愚公 suggests, “The Roommate from Hell.”

Do read it yourself, but here are a few choice kernels regarding his Greek girlfriend’s Chinese flatmate who’s gone with the English name “Nile”:

Blasts her music too loud while others are still sleeping
Hands Meursault a note calling him “Guest in our house” and asking him not to use her favorite cup (Hands him a note!?!?!)
Just barges without knocking in while Meursault and his girlfriend are, mmm, well, you know
Criticizes his “Western” food…but then claims “Chinese bread is better” when he catches her eating some
Nearly refuses to believe he can actually read the Chinese in a magazine that he is, uh, actually reading out loud to her

There’s more; you need to read the whole post.

But while this post reminds me of some of the particularly odd “undesirable social traits” that some Chinese people exhibit (every culture has some), even more it reveals to me why being a 40-year old Married with Children-White and Nerdy Guy in the ‘Burbs in many ways trumps (though I enjoyed it too) being an Adventure-Seeking Globe-Trotting Single Young Buck.

And that is, speaking in terms of my own experience: Young, single, twenty-something years old, ambitious, underpaid, probably just meager social connections at best in a place far from home: You are at the mercy of a random (sometimes nearly chaotic) social fabric, where even your very nice girlfriend can have a roommate who is as annoying as a festering boil on one’s bum. And that can color your entire world puke green.

But good luck to you, Meursault. I’m sure you’ll figure out a solution you can look back proudly on soon, though I suggest it needs to be one that involves this “Nile” person not being in the picture, whether that means you and the girlfriend only hang out at your pad, she kicks Nile to the curb, or she moves to a different flat altogether. Your 20′s are far too short to have many days colored puke green by the likes of Nile.

And on the topic of White and Nerdy:

Which, uh, is of course a parody of:

Sex and Shanghai’s ‘Chinabounder’: Pimple-Faced Geek in Denver, or Traitor in Our Midst?

Mark Baker — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 15:57:01 +0000

This story has more twists and turns than back-to-back American Bandstand and Soul Train classic rebroadcasts.

First there’s the risable “Sex and Shanghai” blog itself (foreigner writes about alleged sexual trysts with ex-students).

Then the indignant Chinese backlash (Chinese professor’s call to unmask and expel the author ‘Chinabounder’).

Then the ‘Sex and Shanghai’ blog goes limp, taken offline “except by invitation only.”

Yesterday I suggested my skepticism over Chinabounder being who he claimed, and necessarily doing what he claimed, or even being where he claimed (back home in Denver, I suggested, which a commentor further speculated to “pimple-faced geek in Denver”.)

And now, reported via Danwei.org, an AP story headlined “Chinese Internet users hunt author of racy blog, but alleged authors claim a hoax” takes this a step further:

…a person responding to an e-mail to a contact address on the site said the authors were a group of performance artists who had fabricated its content as an investigation into online vigilante behavior.

“We did not anticipate quite the level of anger this would raise,” said the message, which said the authors behind the cyber name “Chinabounder” included a British man, an Australian woman, two Chinese men and a Japanese woman.

Already being skeptical of whomever is behind ‘Sex and Shanghai’, I don’t know if I buy that this was started as “an investigation into online vigilante behavior.”

If it is a serious investigation, and not a mere attempt at juvenile provocation–like reports of a young foreigner scattering change at a Beijing bus stop hoping to get Chinese people to chase the coins like hungry beggars–then there had better be a formal publication of findings in the pipeline.

Otherwise, here are a few observations and predictions:

First, Chinabounder, or someone claiming to be Chinabounder, has posted comments on at least one other blog. I noticed them on this post at John Pasden’s Sinosplice from back in May. If Chinabounder has commented elsewhere, then John and the owners of those other blogs could compare notes and report back to us whether Chinabounder’s posting IP is in Shanghai or not. (Or in Denver, perhaps.)

Second, Chinabounder is obviously in touch with the China Blog-osphere. He (or they) were reading Pasden’s Sinosplice Life blog at least as far back as May, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Chinabounder (or at least one of the “performance artists”) has posted there before under a different name.

Third–this enters further into the realm of pure speculation–I have noticed echoes of Chinabounder’s criticisms of China on other blogs under different user names. Chinabounder’s blog is offline now and I can’t find the exact reference, but one day I read a Chinabounder gripe about China that used many of the exact same phrases used by someone who comments regularly at Richard TPD’s blog. I’m not going to say who that poster is, and though it’s possible, I don’t mean to imply that they’re necessarily the same person, only that this “performance artist” group has perhaps sometimes “borrowed” from commentators elsewhere to create the fictional Chinabounder’s rants.

But my overall hunch at this point: Someone knows. Someone in the China Blog-osphere not currently known to be associated with this whole ‘Sex and Shanghai’ thing knows. I am by no means suggesting it’s John Pasden or Richard TPD just because I’ve mentioned their blogs in this post, but Someone Established in This China-Blogosphere Knows. Maybe it’s a friend, maybe it’s a blog author we know by a different name, maybe it’s someone who overheard something at the Shanghaiist 80′s Happy Hour. Who knows. Could be anyone.

But someone knows and isn’t telling.

And with a virtual lynch mob at the IP gate, that is perhaps not a bad thing.

Because if there’s anything Chinese hate worse than reading about some of their “wayward girls” doing the nasty with “ugly foreigners,” it’s being baited by foreigners who are trying to elicit their “arrogant” and vitriolic responses in order to ridicule them.

‘Sex and Shanghai’ Backlash in Machine Translation

Mark Baker — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 18:55:55 +0000

Angle #1 Background

1. There’s a blog kept by a fellow allegedly from England who graphically chronicles his alleged sexual conquests of Chinese women in Shanghai, many of them his former students.

2. Blogs hosted on Google’s blogspot (as ‘Sex and Shanghai’ is) were until recently inaccessible in China.

3. Once ‘Sex and Shanghai’ became accessible in China, some Chinese people discovered it.

4. One of these people, Zhang Jiehai, a professor of psychology at the Department of Sociology in the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, is calling for an all-out witchhunt to unmask and expel the semi-anonymous writer of ‘Sex and Shanghai’.

5. Roland Soong, a dual Hong Kong/USA citizen who often provides English translations of current Chinese articles, news stories and blog/forum entries, has translated Zhang Jiehai’s diatribe.

6. Lots of Chinese (mostly the young male variety, I guess) began leaving blog comments that threaten the ‘Sex in Shanghai’ blogger’s person, relatives, and so on.

7. The ‘Sex and Shanghai’ blog is now closed except by invitation only, at least for the time being.

There are a few different spins on this story going on…but I’m not 100% sure why. Until there’s a video-taped ass-kicking, hidden Web cam rendezvous, police raid, attack on an embassy, exclusive interview with one of the blogger’s conquests or something along those lines, it’s all just mild titillation. (Think National Enquirer.)

Why would I say that?

Because it’s nothing new, that’s why.

It’s just that this version of this story is being blogcasted and people can play along at home.

(And if anyone thinks that it’s all significant because “It’s the first time anything of this nature has ever played out via the Internet and blogs!”…then my-oh-my, you really do need to get out more.)

So…slightly more interesting to me today (though I’ll try to blend these two stories)….

Angle #2 Background

I recently decided to try out Google’s Chinese-to-English machine translation tool, and to see how it compares to what Altavista’s Babelfish online machine translation tool spits out.

And just for kicks, I decided to use Zhang Jiehai’s essay for the comparison.

Here, side by side for your convenience, are the first six paragraphs of (1) Zhang Jiehai’s “rout the garbage foreigner” essay, (2) Roland Soong’s translation of the same, (3) the Google Translator tool’s take on it, and–in last place, as you’ll see–(4) the Altavista “Babelfish” translator’s feeble spit-out. (And don’t miss my closing comments and external links down below.)

Original from Zhang Jiehai (张结海	Roland Soong’s ESWN Translation	Google’s Translator	Altavista’s Babelfish
今天我怀着无比愤怒的心情告诉大家一个外国流氓的故事，并号召各位国人同胞一起行动起来，将这个外国流氓清扫出中国。	Today, with tremendous anger, I will tell you the story of an immoral foreigner and I call upon all Chinese compatriots to get together and kick this immoral foreigner out of China.	Today I tell you with a very angry mood foreign hooligans story, and called on all citizens to go into action compatriots, the Chinese foreign hooligans cleaning up.	Today I have the exceedingly indignant feelings to tell everybody a foreign hoodlum the story, and summoned fellow people compatriot goes into action together, sweeps clear this foreign hoodlum China.
事情的经过是这样的：几天前，一位网友告诉了我一个在上海的英国人的博克。我看了以后震惊、气愤、恶心______，看了他的博克之后，我只有一个念头：是可忍，孰不可忍？一定要把这个垃圾找出来，把他赶出中国！！！	This is how it is: Several days ago, a friend told me about a blog run by an English man in Shanghai. I read it and I was shocked, angered and disgusted … after I read his blog, I had only one idea: This is intolerable and this piece of garbage must be found and kicked out of China!!!	What happened is this : A few days ago, a Website visitor told me a symbol of the British people in Shanghai. After I read shock, anger, nausea : :, read his enormous, I have only one thought : can forbearance, everyone can forbearance? We must find out the refuse, he expelled from China! ! !	This is how it happened: Several days ago, 网友 told me in Shanghai’s Englishes 博克. I will look at later to shock, indignantly, am disgusting… … After Looked at him 博克, I only have a thought: Is may endure, 孰不可忍? Certainly must discover this trash, expels him China! ! !
他在博克里，用极其淫秽、肮脏的语言记录了他－－一个在上海的外教－－利用教师的身份，在上海玩弄中国女人的过程，而这些中国女人大部分竟然是他的学生；与此同时，他又极尽所能侮辱、诋毁、歪曲中国政府和中国男性。	In his blog, he used extremely obscene and filthy language to record how he — a foreign language teacher in Shanghai — used his status as a teacher to dally with Chinese women, most of whom were his students. At the same time, he did everything that he could to insult, debase and distort the Chinese government and the Chinese men.	He Bokeli by extremely obscene, recorded his dirty language — one in Shanghai Waijiao — teachers using the identity of the Chinese woman in Shanghai with the process, which has been his most Chinese women students; At the same time, he also committed to insult, slander, distortion of the Chinese government and Chinese men.	He in 博克 in, with extremely obscene, the dirty language recorded his – - to teach in Shanghai’s outside – - to use teacher’s status, played with the Chinese woman’s process in Shanghai, but these Chinese women majority of unexpectedly were his students; At the same time, he to the utmost can insult, slander, twists the Chinese government and the Chinese male.
他在博克的一开始是这样描述他在上海的生活的：?所以，你们看，这个星期六我和Star在一起，星期天我和Yingying在一起。中间我通过MSN和Cherry联系，打一个电话给Rina，用SMS挑逗Tulip。Susan我给她发了一封Email调情，并通过Wendy的博客向她求爱。?	His blog began this way to describe his life in Shanghai: "Therefore, you see, I was with Star on Saturday and I was with Yingying on Sunday. In between, I contacted Cherry via MSN, I telephoned Rina and I used SMS to flirt with Tulip. I send Susan an email to flirt with her, and I professed my love to Wendy on her blog."	He is in the beginning of this symbol in Shanghai described his life : "So you see, this Saturday me and Star together, and I Yingying Sunday together. Intermediate I and vulnerability through MSN links to a telephone to Rina, using SMS flirting Tulip.Susan I sent her a letter of good can achieve flirt, and through the Boke Schwartz to her task. "	He in 博克 as soon as starts is describes him like this in Shanghai’s life: "Therefore, you looked, this Saturday I and Star in same place, Sunday I and Yingying in same place. Middle I through MSN with the Cherry relation, make a phone call to give Rina, teases Tulip with SMS. Susan I sent Email to her to flirt, and wooed through the Wendy abundant guest to her."
这个垃圾在博克里公开宣称，他纯粹只是为了玩弄这些中国女学生。他说，?我们不谈爱，不谈婚姻，甚至不谈住在一起?他竟然有一次厚颜无耻地说，?我已经厌倦了她，X（女性生殖器）是X，我留着她只是为了以后再玩弄她。?	This piece of garbage openly declared in this blog that he was only dallying with these female Chinese students. He said, "We don’t talk about love, we don’t talk about marriage, we don’t even talk about being together." Once, he was even shameless enough to say, "I ‘m tired of her already. A cnt is a cnt. I keep her just so that I can play with her again."	The garbage in Bokeli publicly declared that he simply playing to the Chinese female students. He said : "We talk about love, about marriage, or even about living together," he even has a sense that "I have tired her, X (female genital mutilation) is X, I left her just to play with her later. "	This trash in 博克 in publicly declared that, he purely only is for play with these Chinese female students. He said that, "we do not discuss the love, does not discuss the marriage, even did not discuss he unexpectedly has in the same place" time impudent and shameless said, "I have already been weary of her, X (feminine reproductive organ) was X, I will be keeping her only am play with her again for later."
这位垃圾的拿手好戏是，用及其淫秽、黄色的语言描绘中国女性的身体和他们做爱的过程。比如，?我亲爱的婷婷，你有一个极好的、漂亮的身体；我无法停止想念你漂亮的皮肤，你可爱、光滑、柔软的乳房，你性感、光滑、精致的小腹，你甜美、优雅的大腿和手臂_____哦，当然，在你的两腿之间，你是多么的漂亮，多么的性感，多么的完美！	This piece of garbage’s favorite show is to use obscene and pornographic language to describe the bodies of Chinese women and how they made love. For example, "My dearest Tingting, you have a very good and beautiful body. I cannot stop thinking about your beautiful skin, your lovely, smooth and soft breasts, you sexy, smooth and fine waist, your sweet and pretty legs and arms … oh, of course, you are so pretty, so sexy and so perfect between your legs!"	This activity is the garbage, and use of obscene, pornographic, the female body and the Chinese language as they make love process. For example, "my dear graceful, you have an excellent, pretty good; I can not stop miss you beautiful skin, you lovely, sleek, soft breasts, you sexy, sleek, refined lower abdomen, you sweet, elegant in the thigh and arm : : Oh, of course, in between your legs, you are how beautiful, how sexy, how perfect!	This trash specialty is, with and its is obscene, the yellow language describes the process which the Chinese feminine body and they makes love. For instance, "my dear Ting Ting, you have extremely good, the attractive body; I am unable to stop thinking of your attractive skin, you are lovable, smoothly, the soft breast, your sex appeal, smooth, fine lower abdomen, you delightful, graceful thigh and arm… … Oh, certainly, between yours two legs, you is the how unattractiveness, how sex appeal, how perfect!

My own conclusions:

Zhang Jiehai’s diatribe is absurd, and pardon me for stooping this low, but if he were gettin’ any himself, he wouldn’t care one iota about the ‘Sex and Shanghai’ author’s escapades.
I find the overtly sexual content in the ‘Sex and Shanghai’ blog to be pretty boring, really.
I’ve had doubts all along–still do–whether the tales in the blog are entirely true, and even if there’s truth involved, whether they’re current. Maybe the author was in Shanghai, did have some similar experiences, but is now fictionalizing them (and his own persona) back home, say, in Denver. Admit it, it’s possible….
After running several comparison tests of various Chinese sources–this one shows it enjoying only a slight advantage–it’s clear that Google’s machine translation ability has far outpaced Altavista’s.
Lots of the Chinglish diatribes by angry young Chinese commenters on the ‘Sex and Shanghai’ blog read like they were translated using Altavista’s Babelfish tool.
The following are phrases from the machine translation versions that I want on t-shirts:

Certainly must discover this trash, expels him China! ! !
“my dear graceful, you have an excellent, pretty good…refined lower abdomen.”
Susan I sent her a letter of good can achieve flirt, and through the Boke Schwartz to her task.”

And my favorite:

I have only one thought : can forbearance, everyone can forbearance?

OK, click away:

The ‘Sex and Shanghai‘ blog (under wraps as I post this)
Zhang Jiehai’s call to Expel the Foreign Garbage
Roland Soong’s translation of Zhang Jiehai’s Essay
The Google Translator tool
The Altavista Babelfish tool

Update: Get it while you can: ‘Sex and Shanghai’ via the Google Cache

42: The Meaning of Life, Chinese Style

Mark Baker — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 19:01:42 +0000

The Cultural Revolution officially began on August 8th, 1966.

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics is scheduled for August 8th, 2008.

42 years apart, I’ve just realized. 42. To the day.

Hmm, I’m going to keep thinking about this one for awhile before drawing any hard and fast conclusions.

42, of course, is the number posited in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy “from which all meaning (the meaning of life, the universe, and everything) could be derived.” (SearchSMB.com).

‘Wow Gold’: Search for, Sale of Video-Game Shortcuts a Booming Industry in China

Mark Baker — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 13:19:23 +0000

Among the recurring Comment Spams I get on my China-related sites is this one (links removed:)

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wow gold–buy cheap wow gold,sell wow gold.welcome to buy cheap wow gold–cheap, easy, wow gold purchasing.World of Warcraft,wow gold Super …
We can have your wow gold,buy wow gold,wow gold game,world of warcraft gold,wow Gold Cheap wow, Cheap wow gold,world of warcraft gold deal,Cheap WOW Gold …
contact: [deleted]@hotmail.com

I’m able to see that these Spam comments are posted from China, but I never gave them much thought.

World Of Warcraft Guide Kopps 1-60.
The Best Alliance Guide For Getting To 60 Fast!
All Locations Marked, Maps And Expansion Soon!!!
On Sale Now >>

At least I didn’t until I recently ran across the story “MODERN CHINESE SECRET: Thousands employed in search for, sale of video-game shortcuts.”

Here’s the short version:

Parked in front of computer screens, the players move through virtual dungeons to slay ogres and gather gold in online games. But this isn’t mere idleness. Many of these gamers are working. A vast shadow industry has mushroomed in rural China. Savvy entrepreneurs harness teams to play popular online games, gathering magic spells, battle hammers, armor and other virtual assets. They then provide the assets to brokers, who sell them to rich players in the United States and Europe who want shortcuts to gaming success.

At any given time, as many as half a million Chinese gamers toil in Internet cafes and makeshift computer labs, sometimes sleeping on cots in nearby dormitories in shifts.

And here I just pictured some bored but industrious high school or college students behind my Comment Spam. Nope. It’s part of a booming underground industry.

Yeah, “Wow,” indeed. I’m almost flattered that they feel my sites worth Spamming, even though I haven’t played a video game since “Quake I” way back when.

And from the pictures, it looks like their working conditions are better than those found in some iPod manufacturing plants in China.

UPDATE: And further fueling my suspicion that all of the MSM’s “feature” headlines are pulled from six-month old YouTube videos, here’s a digital tour and documentary in progress of some Chinese Gold Farms in China, called “Chinese Farmers in the Gamedom: A Work in Progress” by Jin Ge aka Jingle:

Update: A New York Times video article about the same topic.

Rise of the Internet in China

Mark Baker — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:45:31 +0000

I have been watching, connected to, traveling to, and sometimes living in China now for over twelve years, so I feel fairly confident in going on record with the following generalization: Trends and technologies from the outside world often catch on slowly in China, but once they do, they expand with lightning speed and begin bursting at the seams. Case in point, based on my observations, is the use of the Internet in China.

The first time I was aware of any Internet usage in China was in early 1996, when Xiamen University, where I was taking some advanced Chinese language courses during a holiday break from my teaching job in Korea, was considered pretty advanced to have one e-mail address for the faculty of each department to share.

A combination of availability and restrictions, however, seemed to prevent much access to the World Wide Web beyond that.

Fast-forward to 2000, when my wife’s family home here in Anhai, Fujian Province, was pretty much cutting edge by having a dial-up Internet access account. I took advantage of that to convince my employer at the time to let me take a “working vacation” and telecommute from China for a brief period.

I don’t work for the same company now, so I don’t mind telling you that it was a dismal failure. The connection was supposed to be 33.6K, but I think it functioned more like 3.6K, if you can imagine that. I once timed it to see how long it took my employer’s company home page to load.

At home near Seattle on DSL, it was an instant load.

On 56K dialup in the United States, it was somewhere between five and ten seconds.

From my outpost in China: 4 minutes and 24 seconds.

But not long after that, the “lightning speed/bursting at the seams” phenomenon I mentioned took off.

Using my wife’s family as an example, a “3.6K” connection was followed just two years later by readily available ADSL for homes, and my Wife’s Younger Brother, by being familiar with the Net and having a degree in electrical engineering, found himself serving as the chief IT person in his place of employment (even though his job title isn’t IT-related, as I’ve mentioned earlier).

Then my Wife’s Younger Sister and her Husband opened their Internet cafe for a time. And several members of the extended family–siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews–are operating pretty successful small business operations through China’s answer to eBay, called TaoBao. (As a side note, you might like to check this Google News link for insight into a competitive tiff actually going on between eBay and TaoBao).

On one hand, most of the Internet in China news you read about in the mainstream press these days focuses on the negatives: censorship (the so-called “Great (Fire)Wall of China”), restrictions, and the like. But the other side of that story–the much bigger side, I don’t mind saying, thankyouverymuch–is how quickly broadband access poured into the more developed regions of China.

And the increasing rates for Internet usage are pretty dramatic as well.

For comparison, the United States has about 135 million Internet users, which accounts for around 67% of the country’s population. In mid-2000, there were estimated to be only about 24 million Internet users in China. The most recent estimates put that number at over 100 million. And that’s only about seven percent of China’s entire population. (Just wait until that percentage grows!)

There was a statistic floating around a couple years ago that by 2007, the most common language on the Internet would be Chinese. That claim, however, has since been refuted.

Based on what I’ve seen, I too think it won’t happen until later. Like, say, in 2008.

Note: Internet usage statistics for this post gleaned from here, here, and here.

The Peasant, the Soldier, the Worker…and the Discrete 24-Hour Escort Service Girl

Mark Baker — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 19:40:29 +0000

One day while I was getting into a cab in Xiamen, I noticed a sort of (ahem) “business card” someone had stuck on the back window. Curious type that I am, I grabbed the card…and was kind of surprised to find it was an advertisement for a 24-hour escort service.

Now, one gets used to seeing these sorts of cards all over London, and in certain parts of Hong Kong, but this was the first time I’ve seen one in mainland China. In the P.R.C., working girl “hired companionship” is typically more visible as red-light “beauty shops” and such.

Anyway, here’s the card, front and back, advertising sexy models, college students, and housewives as specialties, though I’ve blurred out the cell phone contact number. Don’t want anyone to think I’m an affiliate or anything.

And isn’t it, I don’t know, weird that the gal in the second picture is wearing a Minnie & Mickey Mouse necklace?

White Guys and Asian Girls

Mark Baker — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 04:50:46 +0000

“Wow, your arms are really hairy…”.

This has nothing to do with this visit to China, but we (“white guy, asian girl” after ten years of marriage and two kids, by which time ethnicity and race and all that have long since become secondary or even tertiary to things like whether someone squeezes the toothpaste from the bottom or middle of the tube) found it hilarious. Maybe you will too:

Watch the hilarious “Yellow Fever,” by Wong Fu Productions, which asks the question, “Why are there so few Asian Men with White Women?” And so on:

Nicely done, folks, nicely done–and we’ll be sure to send the link to our “Indian guy/Chinese girl” friends (with two kids of their own).

The Infomercial Age in China: Breasts Enlargened, Baldness Cured…all for just $19.99!

Mark Baker — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 13:34:47 +0000

I had trouble falling asleep last night and resorted to flipping through the CCTV channels until 1 A.M. What I saw both amused and alarmed me. Not the shows, but the infomercials. To my recollection, infomercials hadn’t made it to China yet as of 2000, but last night I saw oodles.

Most alarming: they’re not only cheesy, but undoubtedly reek of “false advertising.”

Two stood out the most: one for bustier bustlines, another for a baldness cure.

The one for breast enlargement showed numerous “before” pictures of Chinese women wearing very loose-fitting, unflattering blouses with their shoulders all slumped over, wearing no make-up, frowning like off-off-Broadway has-beens. The “after” interviews showed them all dolled up with low-cut shirts and–hello?!–obviously wearing push-up bras.

The price per box of the miracle formula: about $6 U.S. dollars.

The baldness cure commercial was hilarious. A variety of foreign men, all overdubbed in Chinese, were talking about how their lives had improved–of course surrounded by supposedly attractive foreign women (at least the best among foreign teachers that they could find, I figure). But the before and after pictures were criminal. In some of the “before” pictures, you could see that a “bald spot” had been shaved onto the fellow’s head. Their “after” pictures were undoubtedly taken before they went under the razor. For others, the “before” picture showed them with obvious natural hair loss, but in the “after” pictures, they were wearing the worst rugs I’ve seen in awhile, making Sam Donaldson look like the old (er, young) Fabio. Even funnier were the “names” they showed on the screen of these men. The worst: One man, identified as “a lawyer,” was given the name “Ashley Judd.”

Oh, but the “cure” itself: it’s a corny space-age looking helmet–think “Red Dwarf,” not “Star Wars”–that supposedly helps stimulate hair growth hormones, so that dormant follicles spring back to life, giving you both a full head of luxuriant hair and an entourage of female English teachers who have been given Chinese make-up makeovers.

The price: about $150 U.S. dollars.

In related news, by chance I noticed a link to a story about crackdowns on false advertising in China today at Shanghaiist.com.