05.07
A new website with (hopefully) some new interesting features but with the same original purpose…and so as a re-dedication and renewal of sorts…I go back to one of my very first posts.
This site, for now, is a sort of electronic journal of my thoughts, ideas and observations of China and everything Chinese. These sixiang (思想) are the product of the
eightten years I spent living in China and are at once serious, irreverent, on-point, off-point, libelous, truthful, funny, silly, stupid, right, wrong but always, I think, insightful. As an expat aquaintance once said to me, “if you’ve lived in China for a year or so you have some idea of what’s going on but if you’ve lived in China for more than five years your an old ‘China hand’ (中国通.）This site is my attempt to keep the old China hand in me young and current. I have big plans for this site. I hope to eventually organize it into a more comprehensive site with pictures and links but for now let just consider it some random gibberish on the road in China.
Keep up the blogs if you are able. I lived in Yantai (Shandong Province) for a summer interning in Chinese Medicine in 1998. I was the only black person in the city of 2 million(?), so I can really relate to a lot of your comments. I was the first black person that many people on the street had seen in person and one of my colleagues told the docs at the hospital I was related to Michael Jordan. I spent an entire month explaning that one.
I’m curious. When I was there in 98, the govt was laying off large numbers of workers and was promising “entrepreneur” business loans to people in lieu of monthly govt checks. Has that concept actually worked? Several of the people I spoke with still had not received any monies even after several months.