A Reuters article, “Masseuses told to padlock pants“, reports on masseuses in Indonesia, but uses a China Daily image from a police raid on prostitutes in a hotel in Jilin, China to go with the story:

The original image from the China Daily article:

And this is three weeks after Western media showed those images of the 3/14 crackdown against Tibetan protestors in Nepal while claiming they were images from Tibet.

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Tags Media, Western Media, Asia

Thanks to Yee for the heads up on Frozen in Shanghai. I wondered if we’d see this in China or not, and what response, if any, it would invoke from onlookers and authorities.

Tags Frozen, Shanghai, China

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With the news that NetNewsWire is now free I decided to download it and see if my ISP, Charter, is still crashing my cable modem through their firmware when I use a desktop feedreader. They are not, which further confirms my suspicion that they were at one point; both NetNewsWire Lite and Vienna crashed my cable modem consistently last fall.

Anyway, I had been using Google Reader, but I never found myself quite as productive with it as I am with a desktop feedreader. As a result, I read less blogs, and thus had less to blog about myself. Now that I’ve got NNW back in my dock I may be blogging a bit more again.

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Tags Feedreaders, Blogging

Jinjin, my wife, has been in the US for nearly a week now. Our cat survived the trip too and is having fun exploring her new home. She’s quite curious about items in the supermarket (Jinjin, not the cat), constantly asking me, “What’s this?” It’s very cute. I think our children are going to have an extra dose of curiosity - in a few years, when we have them!

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Tags Emigration, Immigration

I am pleased to announce that Jinjin, my wife, finally was issued an immigration visa by the United States government.

Because my own work visa in China was set to expire, I have been in the States since July 2007. We had planned on Jinjin being here at that time too, but unfortunately she was denied the visa at her interview. We have had to be very patient for the past six months while sorting out the problem.

She will be traveling here sometime in the coming weeks.

Tags America, Immigration, Visa, Chinese

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Around Chinese New Year I would often be asked by Chinese friends whether I’d go home for the holiday and what my family would do for it. At first I was a little taken aback by these questions. “Um,” I would reply, “Americans don’t celebrate Chinese New Year. If I went home all my family and friends would be working.” After I got used to these questions I simply replied, “Christmas is our Chinese New Year. It’s on December 25 of the solar calendar.”

Lately I’ve been getting similar types of questions from Americans about Chinese: “What do Chinese do for Christmas?”, “Do Chinese give presents for Christmas?” Which assume that Chinese actually observe Christmas in the first place. I now simply reply “Chinese New Year is their Christmas. It’s on February 7 this coming year.”

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Tags Holidays, America, China

Friend: “I hear your wife is having a hard time getting out of China.”

Me: “No, she is having a hard time getting into America.”

Every time I discuss the holdup with Jinjin’s visa with Americans they assume that it is due to the Chinese government. When I tell them that the problem is with the American government they give me a queer look.

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Tags Immigration Visa, Chinese

Since moving back to the States this blog has seen a general lack of activity. Part of this is because I was really busy readjusting, settling in, finding a job, getting settled in the job I found, working on homework for the couple courses I took during the semester, etc. But part of this is because living in the US there really isn’t a whole lot I find interesting to write about.

For instance, while living in China I wrote about seeing the dentist and getting a root canal without anesthetic. By contrast, I had a root canal here in the US last week and was thoroughly numbed, and then prescribed codeine for the pain. What is there to say about that? Compared to the Chinese we Americans are complete wussies?

I hope when Jinjin finally gets here I’ll have more to write about. (We’ve been waiting over ten months—five of which we’ve been separated during—for the US government to issue her a visa.)

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Tags Blogging, Writing

Yee: sucks, cant access to gmail….
feng37: Did someone blow up Google China? Where is Gmail?

Glad. I’m. In. America.

Tags China, Google, Gmail, GFW

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When brewing black loose leaf tea in a teaball in a cup, first shake the teaball over a sink until no more small bits of tea come out, then warm the cup with hot water, pour out the water, put your teaball in the cup, pour boiled water in the cup and cover with a saucer for a minute.

Shaking out the small bits of tea keeps the brew from becoming bitter, warming and covering the cup keeps the tea from brewing too weak.

Tags Tea, Teaballs

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