Category Archives: Photo posts

Posts that show more than tell.

Our 4-yr-old in her Chinese preschool’s Flag-Raising Ceremony

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Our daughter goes to a local, all-Chinese preschool. We live in the neighbourhood and I’m their 外教。 She started last November but unlike most kids who go all day five days a week, she only goes mornings on Mon/Wed/Fri. We’re the only foreigners. This week she got to participate in the Monday morning flag-raising ceremony.

They deliberately put her in the class with the nicest teachers, who don’t criticize and shame and negatively compare and threaten as per normal in China (and like in the other classes). As the English teacher, I’m in each of the seven classes every morning so it’s easy for me to compare their discipline and teaching styles.

It seems like participating in this event and celebrating her birthday, which means going through the birthday kid routine that all the other kids go through on their birthdays, have gone a long way toward her fitting in — both in how she feels and how the other kids relate to her. Maybe it’s made everyone realize more that she’s a student, too, and not just some weird visitor. And of course it helps that her Chinese is way better now than when she started.

The chain is owned by an American/Chinese couple who are our friends and members of our NGO. This means I have way more leverage to address issues than I normally would, so this is an exceptional situation for us. I don’t know what we’d do if our only options were normal preschools. Even for the most cross-culturally savvy families, sometimes putting a foreign kid in a Chinese preschool just doesn’t work. There are endless possibilities for deal-breaking conflict.

Their sashes say “I’m a little flag-bearer” 我是小旗手。 Here’s the video of her little performance:

(Part of being at this local Chinese preschool is a horrible, disorganized sound system. Normally this doesn’t matter, because the point of a Chinese sound system is not to clearly amplify speech or music; it’s to make noise so that events feel more 热闹。 On this day, the mics they first tried to use at the base of the flagpole were set to broadcast inside the school instead of outside. But the other mics that do broadcast through the outdoor speakers couldn’t reach all the way to the flagpole, so they moved the kids over to one side. And then the batteries were worn out and fuzzy and loose. But anyway… :)

She said:

大家好！我是小二班的陆心语。我刚刚四岁了。我要给你唱一首歌：
我爱我的幼儿园
幼儿园里朋友多
又唱歌来又跳舞
大家一起真快乐

Which means:

Hi, everybody! I’m Lu Xinyu from Little Class 2. I just turned 4. I want to sing a song for you:
I love my preschool
At preschool there are lots of friends
There’s singing and dancing
Everybody’s happy together

This was our first day, at the end of October:

More Chinese preschool stuff:

“That’s right, I’m a foreigner!” 对，我是外国人！

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Once upon a time we went to an all-Chinese mall in Vancouver, Canada to practice Chinese. We overheard this group of college-age girls say, “Hey, those wàiguórén speak Chinese!” Wàiguórén (外国人) meaning “foreigner.” And never mind who was in whose country.

Anyway, saw this shirt tonight and had to share. Reminds me of the mzungu shirts worn by wàiguórén in East Africa during bad reactions to culture stress. But with a twist. And not worn by a mzungu/wàiguórén:


“对，我是外国人！” — 弗 2:19
“That’s right, I’m a foreigner!” — Ephesians 2:19

Aside from just being funny, it’s also interesting because of China’s general love/hate relationship with wàiguórén/the West. Just this week I come across usage of “fake foreign devil” 假洋鬼子. And not to mention Chinese Christianity‘s complicated relationship to the English language, Western culture and Western Christianity in particular.

Maybe the t-shirt’s just a Bible joke and not meant to reference any of that. Or maybe it’s deliberately redefining the terms. Either way the joke’s historical-cultural context is hard to ignore. Because historical-cultural context is always hard to ignore. At least for this 外国人。

P.S. - And lest anyone feel like accusing this guy of being a fake foreign devil (假洋鬼子), I should point out that not only does he not speak any English, he doesn’t even have an ‘English name’. Dude is just not interested in “sniffing after foreigners’ farts.”

Related stuff:

Springtime neighbourhood taiji lessons 太极拳

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Saw this on the walk to work (I live and work in the same neighbourhood). These guys are out most mornings. Kicking myself for not having my real camera on hand and having to take these with my phone.

Chinese shadow boxing is actually called 太极拳 (tài jí quán).

More like this here: [Photo Gallery:] Daily tai-chi & morning exercise in Yonghe, Taipei, Taiwan

Our neighbourhood’s anti-Japanese restaurant

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I ducked my head in this restaurant to see if they served dog. Turns out they don’t serve Japanese. And they totally weren’t seeing the slogan possibility with serving dog but not Japanese. Anyway:


“Diaoyu Islands are inherently China’s territory,
this restaurant will not receive Japanese people!”
钓鱼岛是中国固有领土，本店恕不接待日本人！

Interestingly enough, the restaurant right next door is also very patriotic, with “Comrade Mao Zedong” posters on the wall.

For more about popular Chinese hatred for Japan:

Don’t eat dog? We sure missed that memo… [Updated]

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When we were beginner language students I translated a dog restaurant menu just for fun. Now this week in Beijing they’re telling people to stop eating dogs. A friend posted this photo yesterday:


“Please refuse to eat dog meat! There’s all different kinds of food, but ‘friends’ are extremely precious.”
– The Beijing Loving Animals Foundation
请拒吃狗肉！食物多种多样，而“朋友”弥足珍贵
– 北京爱它>动物公益基金会

If there’s a campaign to stop eating dogs, our district in Qingdao has definitely not received the memo. Here’s some pictures I just happen to have on hand, taken right in our neighbourhood and at the nearest restaurants:


“Five Spice Dog Meat” 五香狗肉 Spring Festival gift box.


This hotpot restaurant’s menu includes fish head meat 鱼头肉, beer duck 啤酒鸭, dog 狗肉, and eel 鳝鱼.


At a competing restaurant dog meat tops the hotpot menu 狗肉火锅.

These photos can be found in our public China Instagram feed.

Pro Tip! “Dog food” — is that food for your dog (狗粮), or your dog for food (狗肉)? You’ll probably want to be careful you don’t confuse this:


(pet food store)

with this:


(dog meat gift bag from Chinese teacher)

or this:


(dog meat restaurant)

Pro Tip #2! Dog meat is a wintertime food. In the spring and summer it won’t be available at many restaurants that usually serve it. Because Chinese medicine. So you’ll probably have to wait a while before you get to try any.

On the first glance, it’s not immediately obvious why Mainland Chinese would be campaigning to not eat dog, or any other animal. I found some interesting explanations here: China’s dog-eating controversy is class warfare

And of course we’ve had our own dog eating adventures:

China also has other creative uses for dog, aside from food:

[Update Apr 19]
Dog is more popular around here than I realized. Normally I eat with a group on Friday nights, but everyone had to work overtime tonight. So I was on my own for dinner, and took my time walking around just to see what was available. In five minutes I found five places that serve dog. I’m sure there would have been more but friends called and said they could make it after all so I stopped looking and went to meet them. See if you can find “狗” in each of these pictures:

Chengguan cracksdown on vegetables and chickens, ignores panties

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I know everyone wants to talk about North Korea’s nukes and bird flu, but here’s the big news from our neighbourhood today: a legion of chengguan 城管 showed up to crackdown on vegetable gardens and backyard chicken coups, as was warned about in notices stuck on all the gates a few days ago.

My hunch is the neighbourhood management saw an opportunity in the bird flu situation and took it. The story is this was a village ten years ago and the villagers were compensated with apartment square meterage matching that of their village homes, end result being that this neighbuorhood has a higher percentage of peasants than the average urban development.

Anyway, the chengguan were right outside our windows around 11:15 this morning:

I was at work and Jessica took this out the kitchen window. She said about 30 people in all.

They’re cracking down on domestic chicken coups and vegetable gardens like these:


The notice said it was OK to plant trees and flowers, but not vegetables. Panties weren’t mentioned.

I took a quick spin around the neighbourhood before lunch while out getting eggs. There are vegetable gardens all over the place, but I didn’t see evidence of any being disturbed. Maybe they’re saving their bylaw enforcement for after 休息, and this morning was just recon?

More fun with Chengguan:

3 random Easter-in-China photos

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Three photos from this Easter weekend in Qingdao that just happen to represent three different kinds of Chinese engagement with Christianity. Easter in Chinese is “Resurrection Festival” 复活节。

1. Three-Self Good Friday

At the local Three-Self Patriotic Church‘s Good Friday service. Three-Self churches can seem stodgy in many ways, as if the Party-mandated international isolation and societal marginalization has frozen in time an imported 1930′s Western fundamentalist style of Christianity by strangling its development. But things are changing, as anyone who spends time at their local Three-Self can tell you. Even if the outward forms — music, facilities, teaching, etc. — seem under-resourced at times, this little church is packed every Friday night. This last Friday, half the attendees and the preacher were in tears by the end.

I’m using this picture to represent China’s traditional, legal, urban Christianity.

2. Good Luck Crucifix

A crucifix hanging from the rear-view mirror of our taxi on Easter Sunday morning, next to a typical luck charm (drivers usually hang folk Buddhist, Daoist, even Maoist luck charms). This driver had no idea at all what the crucifix represented; he just vaguely associated it with something positive, saying he doesn’t care about the meanings of any of that stuff but just hangs whatever gives him a nice feeling. (How a miniature scale model of someone being tortured to death could give anyone good vibes — especially if they aren’t aware of the greater hopeful story from which that image comes and what it’s meant to represent — is beyond me.) Have to admit, I was not expecting to see that hanging in the taxi on Easter morning.

I’m using this picture to represent the millions upon millions of Chinese who have zero background knowledge of Christianity, but who cannot avoid encountering it (at least in small, token ways) in today’s China.

3. Jesus Car

A Christian car that shows up in our neighbourhood every couple weeks, including today (Easter Sunday afternoon). What they’re trying to communicate by using English I don’t know (status, education, cosmopolitanism?). They’ve got a cross glued to the dash, where traditional charms like Buddhist prayer wheels often go. But if you look closer you’ll see a key detail that marks them as a new breed of Chinese Christian: their Chinese Bible verse is not written in the traditional, beloved, archaic-sounding KJV-esque translation that 99.99% of China’s churches are unwilling to part with (something that annoys this language student to no end, even though I sympathize). It’s written in the latest translation (Chinese Standard Bible / 中文标准译本), meaning they’re probably part of a next generation of Chinese Christians who are willing to break with cherished traditions.

Even though most of them don’t advertize on the side of their cars, I’m using this picture to represent the newer breed of Chinese Christian, who are typically urban, wealthy, educated and trendy, and whose newly-emerging churches represent an additional third branch of Chinese Christianity along side the Three-Self and traditional unregistered church legacies.

More about Easter in China:

More about Chinese good luck charms: