A friend bought our daughter 蚯蚓的日记, the Chinese translation of Diary of a Worm, as a Christmas gift. It’s actually pretty funny – I think it won some awards or something – and so as a language exercise I’ve back-translated it into English (without ever seeing the original English text).

You can read along!
After all that work, and because it’s a great book, I put my English, the 汉字 and the pīnyīn together into a PDF cheatsheet and uploaded shots of each page into a photo gallery so other language students can test their reading comprehension. On the gallery page you can click through the pages and if you get stuck, either reference the PDF cheatsheet or glance at the captions under each photo, which also contain all the text for that page in English, 汉字，and pīnyīn (the captions are ugly; go with the PDF!).

Of course, if you like it you should buy it. Checking out author Doreen Cronin’s homepage might be nice, too.

If you stop to take a second look, it’s quite obvious that much of Tianjin’s glittering new (and expensive) apartment and office complexes are empty. Yet the building continues. This is happening all over China:
“China continues to build despite an excess of empty commercial real estate.

“Last year, approximately one out of every four square feet of commercial office space in Beijing were empty – about 100 million square feet of zombie space. All over town are dark buildings…

“It looks like growth. But it is zombie growth. People build bridges to nowhere rather than working for profit-making enterprises. Concrete is used to put up cities where no one lives.”

From What’s Inside Qin Shi Huang’s Tomb?

“Qin Shi Huang … ruled the largest unified kingdom the Far East had ever witnessed to that date – the very basis of Imperial China. In military power, economic strength and technical innovation, the Qin … were all powerful.
[...]
“Possessing a grossly swollen ego to match his achievements and status, Shi Huang ordered the construction of a staggeringly large and ornate tomb for himself outside the Qin capital of Xi’an, one that is said to have required hundreds of thousands of labourers to build.

“The tomb … has not yet been explored – and perhaps may never be. If legend about what’s inside is true – and, incredibly, all evidence to date suggests it is – then the First Emperor’s mausoleum contains a wealth of treasures and adornments perhaps greater than any other in ancient history.”

In What Do They Really Think of Us Laowai?, a delegation member from a foreign NGO that has a longstanding good relationship with the Chinese gov. gets a staight answer.

• Happy Learn From Lei Feng Day!
• Meet Mr. Lù – a “living Léi Fēng”

An interesting post titled “Are you or your Chinese friends 小资 (xiaozi)?” explores the current China-specific meanings of 小资 (xiǎozī), a shortened form of 小资产阶级 (xiǎo zīchǎnjiējí) (“petty bourgeoisie”). No longer an entirely negative term, this is a nation where people increasingly and unapologetically embrace their inner yuppie:

…today’s xiaozi are not defined about how they make money, but how the spend it. The term, once used to mark those on the wrong side of the revolution, has now been co-opted by popular culture to mean something entirely different and not entirely negative.

Pronounced: chǒu wén
Literally: shameful/ugly/disgraceful news
Means: scandal

My folks came to see us during Spring Festival and we spent a couple days in Beijing. Ditan Park has Beijing’s biggest Spring Festival Temple Fair and it barely contains an unbelievable amount of people, noise and colour. We had a blast, though I wouldn’t recommend it for those who easily suffer from sensory overload! Click the link or the photos below to go to the photo gallery.

Beijing’s Ditan Park Temple Fair 地坛庙会 – 2010 Feb. 20

The Problem

Problem: you have someone’s grandbaby, niece, nephew and/or great-grandbaby, and you live on the other side of the globe. Aside from mom and dad, all the people who love him or her the most are far, far away. This really, really sucks!

We were in Canada for the first four months of Lilia’s life (she spent her first month outside her mommy in the NICU). During that time our Facebook accounts were filled with baby photos and videos as well as daily comments from family and friends all around the globe. And that was when we were still living with family in our own country; we hadn’t even left yet.

In China, Facebook is was the ultimate tool for sharing baby photos and videos with far away family members (and, thanks to the privacy options, not the entire sleaze-saturated, creep-infested, pervert-enabling internet). Everyone from my grandparents to their great-grandkids are on Facebook, and it just kills to not get to share our daughter with them. We also miss the weekly and often daily FB interaction revolving around our nieces and nephews and whatever other family adventures are going on (most recently: the 2010 Olympic Games in our hometown!). Obviously it’s not as good as being within driving distance of your relatives, but FB was a big help and it’s sorely missed.

Some Options

So, 怎么办？ Here’s the three options we’ve come across for making the physical distance from family members a little less painful. If you have other ideas, please let us know in the comments!

1) Get a VPN
We haven’t bothered to used a paid service to unrestrict our internet in China. When it comes to the internet less can be more, I’m really cheap, and I assume those VPN services will be blocked eventually anyway. But for $60 bucks a year (wow, I really am cheap…) you can get great services like the one we just won for free! The good folks at ChengduLiving.com had a free giveaway and just yesterday we won six months of free VPN service! We tried it this morning and it’s working great; click here to see the details — you can get a discount code from ChengduLiving.com. (Thanks tons, guys!) Our original strategy didn’t involve VPNs, so I don’t know if we’ll keep using it or not once our free six months are up.

2) Get/Make a Facebook substitute
I’m really cheap, Facebook was already sucking up too much of my time, and I wanted a baby-photo-sharing backup that would work even if/when China blocked every proxy and VPN in the world. So we set up a private, password-protected, family-only WordPress blog. Since we already pay for our own domain name and hosting, this didn’t cost us anything extra. It’s not as slick as Facebook, of course, but we can still share photo galleries and upload video clips that our family can download, and everyone can leave comments and share their own stories and photos. It’s also nice to have some family-members-only space on the internet. Our families can see photos and video the same day we take them.

There’s no guarantee that our domain name/hosting server won’t go the way of Facebook, YouTube, and a growing list of proxies and VPNs; personal sites get blocked, too. But we try to play nice by staying away from topics and words that the gov. deems sensitive. Plus sites like ours aren’t as high priority for censors or as high profile as proxies anyway.

3) Use Skype
You don’t need a top-of-the-line computer or video camera (we have older stuff) to pull off great Skype video calls. And it’s free! And if your grandparents are too computer-illiterate to handle Skype, you can just Skype their phones for pennies a minute at the most ($0.02/minute to Canada and the USA). When international video calls or phone calls are this easy, it’d be tragic not to take advantage of the opportunity.

Any other ideas? How do you stay connected with family and friends back home?

Related:

• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

From Chinese patients demanding (and receiving!!) I.V. antibotics for viruses to the local “businessman mentality” among expats who smoke, drink, and sleep around way more than they ever would at home, the good doctor at MyHealthBeijing.com introduces us to the differences he encounters practicing Western medicine in China: “An American Doctor In China: What’s Different?”