Continued from yesterday Except for that first person, who seemed more worried about the consequences for himself if the foreigners got hurt, nobody cared that we were wandering out to the edge of a dam still under construction. Looking out over the edge I realized how high up we must have been, my apartment was on the 8th floor, and this was much [...] Keep reading »

It’s Friday, let’s reminisce a bit about my time in Longzhou. Kyle and I enjoyed taking long bus rides whenever we had a few hours of sunlight to enjoy after the noon heat let up. One of the most interesting places to visit, and my mother hated when I did, was the hydro-electric dam that was being built a few miles upstream. It was about a 30-4 [...] Keep reading »

A few weeks ago I wrote a post where I commented that the Communist Party doesn’t interfere with my daily life for the most part. That was accurate. However it should also be modified, since the party is ubiquitous (American’s can’t even pretend that what we have is ‘big government’ by comparison). After looking at that chart it should be [...] Keep reading »

Yesterday’s look at why one person didn’t join the Party gives us a good starting point for looking at what the Party actually is, and how it fits into China’s government system. I’ve asked many of my friends and students over the past few years why they joined the Party, the most common answer the students give is that bein [...] Keep reading »

The following post was written by one of my friends. In this slightly longer piece I asked him to write for the blog, he explains why he decided against joining the Communist party. English is not his first language, so please accept that there are a few grammar problems, but his word choice is very accurate. In the next week or so there should be [...] Keep reading »

I spent the last 24 hours or so coming back to the US. Traveling home always reminds me that the world is small enough that we can travel from any point on the globe to any other in a matter of hours (depending on the airline and weather). Traveling also reminds me how huge the Earth really is, after all I was traveling at over 400 miles an hour an [...] Keep reading »

So far we’ve looked at speaking Chinese, and the basics of forming characters (which are complete words themselves), so today we’re wrapping up the series and looking at compound words. Compound words are formed by putting two characters together to create a single, new meaning. For example 中国zhongguo (China) separately they mean &# [...] Keep reading »

Yesterday’s article focused on why speaking Chinese is easier than it seems. Today I’m tackling the biggest fear most foreigners have when they start to learn Chinese, characters. There are a couple things you need to know about written Chinese before we start. The first is that the characters have changed in 3 big ways over the last 5, [...] Keep reading »

One of the first thing people ask me when I tell them I live in China is whether or not it’s a difficult language. The short answer is: yes. Like any language it is tricky, but I promise it’s not as bad as it seems. So for the next couple days I’m going to try to explain the basics of how Chinese works, and you’ll see what I’m tal [...] Keep reading »