Nick has started a thread on WTH Conversations In China. Whyguoren writes about trying to use his bank card in a bank. Talk Talk China writes about… actually almost everything on Talk Talk China is about the WTH moment.
Life in China is full of these moments when logic and reason are nowhere to be found. […]

My sister and I were talking about the shades of gray in Chinese honesty. In just the last few weeks, she’s already been witness to quite a lot of what we in America might describe with the local idiom “lying through one’s teeth.”
It’s pretty common to be told that what you want is out of […]

When Stick and I were in Qingdao, we stopped at a tiny DVD store, mostly so he could read the Chinglish. After a few months in Yantai, I’m usually so excited to see an English sentence, that I can over look some of the errors that leave Stick gasping for air.
These DVDs are […]

I’ve already talked my sister into visting me in China in August. (This is a picture of her with her Chinese music ensemble at Wesleyan… guess which one is my sister!) Now I’m trying to convince my mom and my dad to come to China, too. I really hope they can come — it’s going […]

Although I only know a few Chinese words, I already have some I don’t like. My least favorite word is ??, which is pronounced “ma-yo” and basically means “have no. I can recognize it in short sentences, like “We have no Yantai beer” or longer phrases like “Elevators are a stupid Western invention and this […]

On my three-month anniversary with China, it was time to renew my visa. This was complicated enough in the US, a system that doesn’t run entirely on bribes and connections. Dealing with UMass administration for five-and-a-half years of college was good preparation for dealing with the Yantai Public Security. The Yantai Public Security Office is […]