Monthly Archives: November 2012

We found a couple of interesting lunch-box-sized containers in our Zhuhai, China hotel room last week.

I don’t read Chinese, but I’m guessing this is what it says: “In case of terrifying, metropolis-consuming conflagration, calmly put on this aluminum respirator and a thick, acid-wash denim jacket. Stand still. Breathe normally.”

The images of skyscrapers are for scale. The person wearing the fire helmet is actually 97 stories tall.

Fair enough.

In the past few weeks, some puzzling banners have appeared in the high-traffic area of Tsim Sha Tsui. (For those interested, that’s pronounced “Chim Shah Choy” by Anglophones, which is actually a pretty good approximation of the Cantonese pronunciation.)

Labeled as the work of the harmless-sounding “Hong Kong Youth Care Association” (which has this benign website), the banners sport very strongly-worded slogans about Falun Gong. Continue reading →

A couple of weekends ago we had the unique opportunity to attend the City University Banquet. This is an annual event put on by the Student Union, largely as a fundraiser but also in large part as a hell-raiser. (Hey now!) One of the open spaces, normally a rather staid taxi drop-off point near the gym and the main administration building, gets transformed into a giant sea of tables, with a stage at one end and massive sound and lighting gear all over. Here’s an overview:

On most days, this space is basically empty.

Some serious lighting. Some seriously loud audio.

Tickets to attend aren’t super expensive, but they aren’t super cheap either. My office purchased an entire table, so we were there with a bunch of colleagues.

Continue reading →

The US Consulate had a very nice Election Day event on Wednesday. Yup, on Wednesday—because of the time difference (during standard time we’re 13 hours ahead of the East Coast), we had the rather pleasant experience of being able to “stay up” to watch the returns come in, and all the speeches get made, and then enjoy a mid-afternoon glass of champagne before heading off to dinner. It felt very civilized.

The event was intended principally for local college faculty to bring 10-12 of their students to witness Democracy In Action. So there was a mock voting booth, some speeches from the consul general, a pitch for students to consider studying in the US, and so on.

The student-to-balloon ratio was roughly 2:1.

The invitation had promised food that was “American fare,” so we were pretty excited about that. When we got to the consulate, we saw a Pizza Hut delivery moped outside and thought “It can’t be….” But it was! Pizza Hut pizza for all to enjoy. Cate got a slice, leaned down to take a bite, and recoiled. Imagine our dismay when we learned that, in Hong Kong style, the pizza had seafood on it. Sure, you can get clams casino pizza in New Haven, but come on. Continue reading →

This post has taken a while to write.

The majority of our trip to Shenzhen, as I described in my last post, was a more-or-less wacky good time. It was a bit disorienting, to be sure, but we felt pretty much on solid ground—a little research and a good amount of time in HK had prepared us pretty well for the whole thing, and while the shopping experience was certainly surreal in some ways, it was still well within the realm of the ‘normal’ world.

But the entire atmosphere of Shenzhen, for whatever reason, gave me a vague sense of apprehension almost from the moment we crossed the border. It’s difficult to describe. There was no sense of immediate physical threat, nor pity, nor surveillance. Just a weird, latent tremor. Continue reading →