The red ball bounces across the classroom while about fifty pairs of kiddies’ eyes stare enthralled, counting the number of bounces, seven, eight, nine… The ball starts to roll and team three in the class roars out, “ELEVEN!” They had guessed eleven bounces and therefore their team gets points. I am teaching them numbers, and […]
China
Posted inLifestyle
A beautiful squalor: photos from Che Fang
Her hand is a smile opening him to this place – Che Fang; the bitter twists of steam from oil drums used to fry dumplings and egg cakes on this nameless path to the school where he teaches … …the Chinese mist gentling the bareness of people’s lives here, the threadbare clothing and shoes. The […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
On the politics of bottom-touching in China
I recently had a fresh cultural shock here in China: seven to 10-year-old kids, at the primary school I sometimes teach at, who have a fondness for running up and touching my backside. Including in class. I tried to understand the reason why. I think it’s because Westerners, by and large (forgive the pun), actually have butts. There […]
Posted inLifestyle
Unstoppable forces and immovable objects
“That’s my new house,” my Chinese tour guide gestured toward a row of featureless apartment blocks beneath our vantage point overlooking the river, “and that’s where I used to live.” She showed me a photograph of a modest two-storey structure within the walls of the ancient city of Fengjie. It presumably remains intact, albeit more than […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Linden execution: High horses and hometown tangos
This week a 35-year-old South African drug trafficker, Janice Linden, was executed in China by lethal injection. That China should dare apply its own laws on its own territory has unleashed in South Africa a whirlwind of misplaced outrage and platitudinous sanctimony. The Inkatha Freedom Party termed the execution ‘unfortunate’ — which it undoubtedly was […]
Posted inGeneral
Lust, Chinese women and transformation
I live in a city in China, Suzhou, which, if you google, apparently has the loveliest women in China. Having lived in different parts of this country for nearly six years I can believe it. Many young women here are in unbelievably perfect shape. They are criminally, sinfully sexy, and in summer, they dress so […]
Posted inGeneral
Brics, emerging markets, journalism and dying newspapers
Every now and again, I pick up some object and find that, to my astonishment, it is not made in China. It seems that so much is, from cheap clothing to iPhones. So it’s not surprising that China is now South Africa’s biggest trading partner. Perhaps the big increase in trade is behind an assumption […]