I confess. I love tuangou (团购 Chinese for “group buying”) and frankly, how could you not? A four-course Cajun dinner with wine for two people only cost 116 RMB, one third of its original price. A movie ticket in a downtown cinema can be purchased for less than half what it would cost to walk up to the ticket window. Once you get a taste of it, you just cannot stop. Or maybe it’s just me. I’ve always loved shopping. And sales. And online stuff. Basically, I am a group buy website’s dream demographic – a professional urban Chinese girl with a decent salary and an eye for bargains.
And apparently I’m not the only one. Within the last year, over a thousand Groupon-style websites have opened in China. They provide deals on everything you need in life (and some of the things you don’t need, but want to buy anyway), from delicious meals in fancy restaurants to imported high-end makeup products, to hotel rooms in nice resorts to cameras and electronic equipment.
For me, surfing the tuangou websites is like opening presents at the Christmas, except it happens every day and you can choose what you want and skip the ones
Roof design, Long Corridor, Summer Palace, Beijing
The New York Times published an article about Han Han last week. In the article, Graham Lee, a Hong Kong native studying in Peking University was quoted saying “His way of thinking is different from that of ordinary Chinese.”
At first glance, this sentence sounds offensive. How do ordinary Chinese think? However, thinking for a second, I am not surprised that he felt this way.
In any other country, I don’t think Han Han would be that special. His criticisms and the courage to challenge authority, even the having the balls to drop out of high school, are common characteristics of young people around the world. He is a very good writer, that’s for sure, but in most places his writing wouldn’t be enough to make him one of the most popular bloggers and an iconic figure. However, in China, what Han Han says and does has value.
When I was in college, I was a fan of Han Han. His books opened my eyes and mind. For the first time in my life, I realized students could criticize and analyze profoundly the problems of the China’s education system. His words were harsh, but they were just so true.
Throughout
From a reader in Sichuan:
Just an aside (and yes, this will be a threadjack), I was wondering if anyone here could help me out with ‘the great laowai’ debate I am having here. I have been living in China for 2 years, I HATE to be called laowai (because of the informal connotation of lao3, because hey, if you don’t know me, you gotta keep some formality… for example, once I accidentally called my then future-father-in-law laoshu, and he got SUPER pissed, etc). One of my friends who has been here a hella long time agrees, another does not. Waiguoren is a ok. Hell, somebody could call me wairen. Am I being overly sensitive, or should I be resigned to my fate to be people’s dear foreigner here?
Also, where the hell did the term come from?
This is one of those topics that is perennial fodder for China bloggers. (See these posts in 2005, 2008, and 2010 as well as my own take on the subject back in 2006. ) Is Laowai a term of respect or of contempt?
I asked Yajun and this was her response:
After all this time, it’s become a label, a way to
Chinese graduate student Zhai Tiantian was arrested recently on charges he threatened to burn down the campus of the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. Now, as a fellow graduate student I totally get the whole battling tortured impulses and the importance of NOT listening to those voices in your head…
But according to Luo Gang, the Chinese Consul General in New York, the cause was quite simple. Such cases, said Luo, originate usually out of cultural differences.
What a crock.
I am in no way denying the existence of cultural difference nor am I (totally) minimizing the importance of culture in our daily lives. My students just read the Anthropology classic “Shakespeare in the Bush,” and while there may be more sophisticated and systematic looks at culture and the nature of culture, even four decades later few pieces present the problem in such stark relief or with such a rich helping of humor.
That said, when somebody works or lives in a different culture, this notion of ‘cultural difference’ can become a broad brush to paint over the myriad other complex relationships that bind us together as human beings. If I work in a Chinese office and I
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