If one little article can tell you more about the recent ethnic violence in China than the bulk of the mainstream media combined, this is it: The Xinjiang Riots: Tried Paradigms, Fresh Tensions.

An opinion piece from the China Daily about what’s happening to China’s cities: “The pace of gentrification is happening so fast all over China, especially in the nation’s megacities, that I’m getting pinched, rather than delighted, by it. Certainly, our cities are more photogenic now than a decade or two ago, but at what price are we paying for the improvement?”

“Local governments are shaping urban China in similar ways, leaving a trail of empty streets that look like movie sets – pretty but soulless.”

Very cool old footage of Tianjin, Beijing, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Shanghai from the 1920s. The higher quality version is on YouTube here, but if you’re living in a certain place where They don’t let you watch YouTube sometimes, then you can see another version here.

Chinese-English Ambigrams are visual puns made from English and Chinese words. Looked at one way it says the word in Chinese characters; looked at another way and it spells the same word in English. (Found this via Sinosplice.)

I always try to imagine parallels and differences between Chinese immigrants raising their kids in North America and us raising a family China. Our first child is due in the middle of Julywas born seven weeks early, and if all goes well we’ll move back to China in September (our families would never have forgiven us if we’d had our child on another continent!), so when I spend time with Chinese friends on this side of the Pacific it often makes me imagine what it will be like for our daughter (and her future siblings) in China. Even though Chinese immigrants and 老外 expats both live in a country and culture not their own, I wonder if their experiences are more different than they are similar.

For example, I recently stayed three nights with a Chinese family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana for the second time. The parents came to the U.S. as adults when their now teenage son was two. They have two other especially cute kids: a six-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter.

Within the local Chinese circles that this family runs in, the general level of English is better than most other Chinese I know — actually, some of them have better English than a lot of Americans (especially in Louisiana)! However their strengths are reading and writing (lots of advanced degree holders from LSU), and when talking they’re still more comfortable in Chinese, which was great for me.

Although all three of their kids understand Chinese, the youngest two will only respond in English. I don’t know if they can’t or just won’t speak Chinese. When the four-year-old speaks, you can hear a southern U.S. drawl in her vowels, especially when she’s disappointed: “Aw may-an!”

It’s such a common situation for Chinese immigrant families. It seemed the parents of the Chinese kids at the local Saturday Mandarin school in south Baton Rouge were all struggling to not let their kids lose their family’s language.

This probably won’t be our problem in China. While Chinese immigrant families to North America often struggle unsuccessfully to raise kids who retain their family’s culture and language of origin, North American 外国人 in China (few if any truly immigrate to China) have the opposite problem: getting so thoroughly sucked into the foreigner subculture in their jobs and social lives that they abdicate the opportunity to pick up serious levels of Chinese. Their kids grow up in the international school system or home school, if they even stay in China long enough to grow up. I’ve only heard of a North American kid losing their English once, and that was in a book where the kid’s parents had moved to China in the 50′s to join the Revolution.

In Tianjin there were tons of foreigner kids (most?) who couldn’t speak Chinese; they spend their whole China experience inside the foreign bubble. Chinese immigrant kids, by contrast, typically go through the American school system. The only foreign kids I met in Tianjin that could speak Chinese (and they spoke fantastic Chinese) were the exceptions; their parents had gone out of their way to put them through Chinese kindergartens and some primary school, rather than start them in international schools or home schooling like most foreigner families.

Still, it’s a scary thing to imagine — your kids not being fluent in your own language, not being able to communicate smoothly with you or your parents or your siblings or your nephew and nieces! That must be just a brutal experience for immigrant families in Vancouver and the grandparents who can’t talk with with their grandkids.

The Foreign Expert translates a magazine spread where writers recall their childhoods from the ’60s through the ’80s. The essays “follow the thread of China’s modernization and opening up, from the simple, hopeful lives of the Cultural Revolution to the first big influx of products and ideas two decades later” — Bread, Milk, and Pocket Change: A Brief History of Childhood.

From the perennial hit SleepingChinese.com:

They talk about “The Sleeping Giant”. About “The Birth of the New Super Power” or “The Awakening of the Red Dragon”. Often with a strange kind of undertone, which is supposed to frighten us. The reality definitely looks more peaceful.