rolling buried alive in china 2012

oh also

Urine-soaked eggs a spring taste treat in China city

would definitely try those

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg22/scaled.php?server=22&filename=barfoff.gif&res=medium

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/manlyu.gif

rip UTOPIA

wellll http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-04/china-s-internet-censors-decide-comments-are-dangerous.html this too

qingming jokes

清明节快到了，地下的先烈们纷纷打来电话询问：

江姐问：国民党被推翻了么？
答：被阿扁推翻了。

董存瑞问：劳动人民还当牛做马吗？
答：不劳动了，都下岗了。

吴琼花问： 姐妹们都翻身得解放了吗？
答：思想解放了，都当小姐了。

扬子荣问：土匪都剿灭了 吗？
答：都改当公安和城管了。

杨白劳问：地主都消灭了 么？
答：都入党了。

雷锋问：那 资本家呢？
答：都进人大和政协了！

刘胡兰问：同志们都藏好了么？
答：都隐身上网了

毛主席问：大家现在都在忙什么？
答：都在斗地主！
毛主席：那我就放心了

sorry let me get back on track

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/writersandco_20120401_40421.mp3

eleanor wachtel w chan koonchung talking about the fat years

an interesting guy. interesting conversation.
(book is sorta weak to me. even weaker old fashioned-y english translation by decrepit weirdo michael duke)

fuck, i shouldn't call him a decrepit weirdo, even if i meant it in a nice way. michael duke is a legit o.g. in the world of chinese literature and has a deep knowledge of the field and i treasure my time spent with him CHIN412 in buchanan building lecture halls madly jotting down notes in an indecipherable mixture of traditionalsimplified characters and pinyin trying to soak up some genius or trying to keep up while butting into a conversation between him and yu hua.

but his translations are creaky and dull http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkklll.gif

dylannnn I'm not big on chinese lit on general, but thought you might find this interesting

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/china-stories

hey, bo, where you wanna go?

lai changxing, smuggler, pimp and folk hero, subject of the great book inside the red mansion, who made it to canada and had a good run before being kicked out and sent back to china with a promise not to kill him...

going on trial
in xiamen

http://www.chinasmack.com/2012/stories/hierarchies-of-snobbery-and-contempt-by-chinese-netizens.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkRkAS11k2A

china is like a bunch of 12 year olds arguing whether the ps3 or the xbox360 is better xp

right. this is pretty absurd.

taking it serious for a second...

Social Networks: Facebook > Kaixin > Renren > Tencent Pengyou

u on any of these these dyao? i was surprised that facebook is like the one site that people are willing to bother downloading freegate for (FG same initials as its #1 moneygiver FAL** GO** and the u.s. state department i think). i sort of just set it aside until i realized everyone i knew was on it (that was under 35 and prob wealthy + spoke english). i checked out renren and kaixin but hated both. and i actually like qq pengyou because it has the qq userbase
just like weixin
which is the most necessary thing to have on your mobile device in china (love the LOOK AROUND feature).

Cell Phones: Blackberry > Apple > Xiaomi > HTC > Samsung > Sony Ericsson > Nokia > Motorola > Lenovo > ZTE > shanzhai mobile phones

mannnnnnnnnn... i don't even know what xiaomi is. blackberry shouldn't be on there. htc is a step above shanzhai. apple is #1 for sure. samsung is #2, i think! nexus is def widely coveted and snobbish.

Fast Fashion: Topshop > Zara > H&M > Forever 21 > Vera Moda > Metersbonwe/Yishion/Bossini.

http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Shen-Congwen-a-letter

hey u guys think shen congwen ever banged ding ling?

the granta CHINA WEEK was boring. never want to read another interview with mo yan again.

not on any of the chinese ones, but a lot of my friends are on renren, and of course everybody has QQ + weibo

everybody in HK is on facebook

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/half-a-world-away-a-familiar-name/

Is HK firewalled?

nope

that's why google.cn redirects to google.hk

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/4/24/bo-guagua-statement-to-the-crimson/

harvard must be thrilled at the uptick in web traffic

Showing 80 of 1119 comments

so ah chen guangcheng escaped??

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/activists-blind-chinese-lawyer-flees-house-arrest-16224458

so should i read The Fat Years?

what else do you have to do?

I cna't keep up with the chen guangcheng saga it's too much

big mords.
as i said above
it reminds me a lot of late qing/republican era utopian novels/national allegory novels. sort of unsophisticated somehow and it isn't helped by the oldfashioned translation.
more interested to read about than actually read.
listen to the eleanor wachtel interview.

i'm guessing he's not leaving on hillary's plane
as he's asking
but i've been wrong about stuff like this before. but hiding out in the us embassy was probably a good move longterm even if possibly they weren't 100% honest with how they dealt with him.

this is going to sound terrible, but it's so rare to read a contemporary novel that really matters to any ppl anywhere - or at least it seems that way to me. that's at least 80% of my interest. the other 20% is that i have a thing for dystopias.

http://shanghaiist.com/2012/05/07/photos_college_grads_dress_as_migra.php

these people are really gross

mordy: http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2012spring/koonchung.php

that review was written by my former TA who knows his stuff

agree with everything there and it was what i was trying to say

fits in tradition of most modern chinese fiction -- didactic, characters are wooden and moved around in simplistic plots with the most inelegant fiction moves you'll ever see, dialogue often turns into lectures on the lesson that the work is trying to inform us about

and of course, modern chinese lit has a small stable of translators (goldblatt & duke account for 99% of every chinese novel in translation i think) that seem incapable of turning chinese into modern english. the translations often remind me of the english of novels of the 40s and 50s. so much so much bad chinese-english translation.

http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/1280

v interesting, confession I once thought about doing comp lit for a living

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/06/120206fa_fact_chang?currentPage=all

I had no idea that leslie chang was married to peter hessler

not really a fan of that style ofw riting though, a little too smug, positing america + historical china as better paradigms. uhh, america is pretty fucked up too, and historical china is not that much better than current china

hessler's book about driving in china (which is really good) is dedicated to her and i think
factory girls was dedicated to him

i think i wrote briefly about du lala's promotion on chinese littranslation site paper republic
not sure. but it's fairly horrifying. chang's piece here isn't... .... bad..............

Shanghai Index drops 64.89 points on anniversary of Tiananmen Square (which occurred on 6/4/89)

o_0

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-04/tiananmen-date-match-bars-searches-for-china-stock-index.html

Provocative analysis of how the Chinese economy is rigged to the benefit of the elite:

http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2012/06/macroeconomics-of-chinese-kleptocracy.html

no surprises there

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/30/world/asia/hong-kong-national-education-controversy/index.html

sigh

Interesting speculation on how the Bo Xilai situation may play out and what it all means:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/aug/02/bo-xilai-unanswered-questions/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvb1kjP2mSY

lol my dad taught me these exercises when I was 7 -_-

feels good man

massages seem like a disgusting indulgence when i'm in the western world but in the mystical east i like them because 1) xxx xxx x xxxxxxx xx xxx xxx and 2) the intense face massage where your sinuses are pounded and you feel the masseuse's fingers going into these hidden miniature holes in your face, feels like your skull is being dismantled.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/world/asia/hong-kong-voting-for-legislature-is-heavy.html?_r=1

interesting story about 1) support for pro-democracy candidates having some success 2) pro-beijing candidates having some success (article suggests part of the success is through gaming the byzantine hk electoral system):

The pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong used this arrangement to its advantage, running multiple slates in election districts across Hong Kong and using its formidable logistical network to guide tens of thousands of supporters to vote for one or another of its slates. As a result, the party won a series of seats for its top-of-the-slate candidates despite a weak overall vote count.

and there's this element, which has been mentioned before:

Only 40 of the legislature’s seats are elected by the general public; the other 30 are chosen by industries like banking and by professions like the law and Chinese medicine. These functional constituencies, as they are known, are mostly dominated by people who have connections to mainland China, many of whom have investments there; they tend to choose pro-Beijing lawmakers.

also interesting that the "national education" program has been set aside for the moment.

i had dinner in shenzhen a little while ago with some women that graduated college in the late-80s and were involved in the student movement (first time i ever heard of smashing bottles in protest of deng xiaoping-- i always thought deng came out okay in 89 and didn't realize there was much protest directed at him. i always thought his concessions to smashing protest was understood as self-preservation, because he was so linked to hu yaobang and zhao ziyang. and then in 92, he basically restarted the reform process with his southern trip and swung influence away from the hardliners. but this was just how i understood it). they had lots of stories about their fathers, who were the first people going into hk in the 80s and how they came back with books, magazines, news and hk was like a gleaming beacon of freedom (another common story: after 89, the news from hk stopped and their fathers wouldn't say shit about what they had seen/heard about tiananmen and the crushing of the student movement and it clearly freaked them the fuck out). but as soon as i mentioned anything like, say, being shy about speaking mandarin in hong kong and disturbed by "national education" and politicians speaking mandarin or being unnerved by the legions of 7-series with 粤 plates and the way mainland political and business influence would change the city in negative ways (my opinions are mostly emotional and maybe nearsighted and wrong and show a superficial understanding of hong kong's situation), i was met with unexpectedly fierce nationalism. one woman said that in shenzhen when they learned that hong kong would return to china in 97, they were saddened, but that now it's just inevitable and right that hk be absorbed back into the people's republic as quickly as possible because IT'S PART OF CHINA. they also reminded me that hk has no future outside of china: no resources! how many financial centers does china need? hk only made a living when china was closed! yeah.

elsewhere

http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/gazettetimes.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/2/be/2bedb1c8-f96c-11e1-9c2e-0019bb2963f4/504ac6f6e9c02.preview-620.jpg

Citing “strong resentment from the local Chinese community,” the Chinese government has asked the city of Corvallis to force a Taiwanese-American businessman to remove a mural advocating independence for Taiwan and Tibet from his downtown building.

before i saw the images, i expected it to be a little more subtle...