One of the last remaining fun things about the internet is getting to pass judgment on the goings-on in households that you would never hear about otherwise. On Reddit, for instance, there is a whole thriving sub for just this purpose called Am I the Asshole?, where people describe conflicts from their lives and ask strangers to adjudicate on them. This week, a story on the BBC threw up a particularly juicy piece of other people’s business that has been sparking debates on Chinese social media. It starts in 2017,…
Tag: Life and style
The Beijing courier who went viral: how Hu Anyan wrote about delivering parcels – and became a bestseller
Hu Anyan is not a fan of online shopping, but, as he discovered during the months he spent as a courier in Beijing, plenty of people are. Not long into the job, he was assigned to delivering parcels to a large construction site. He didn’t have to deliver that many – 10 to 20, most days – but getting them to their rightful owners wasn’t always easy. There was a crane driver who was often in the air when Hu arrived. He would ask him to come again the next day,…
Swatch pulls ‘slanted eye’ ad after backlash in China
The Swiss watchmaker Swatch has apologised and removed an advert featuring a model pulling the corners of his eyes, after the image prompted accusations of racism and calls for a boycott on Chinese social media. Internet users heavily criticised the “slanted eye” gesture made by the Asian male model as racist. In a post on Instagram and the Chinese social media platform Weibo on Saturday, Swatch acknowledged the “recent concerns regarding the portrayal of a model” in the advert and said it had deleted the promotional material worldwide. “We sincerely…
The rapid rise of Luckin coffee: is this the end of the Starbucks supremacy?
Name: Luckin. Age: Seven – it was founded in October 2017. Appearance: 20,000 locations and counting. Locations doing what? Serving coffee. It’s a giant coffee chain. Oh yeah? If it’s so giant, how come I’ve never heard of it? Because it started in China. Isn’t China better known for tea? Yes, but they have drunk a lot more coffee since Starbucks opened its first outlets there in 1999. Luckin overtook Starbucks as China’s biggest coffee chain in 2023. If Chinese people want Chinese coffee, so be it. It’s a big…
‘Mom, am I the missing twin?’: the story of two babies separated by the Chinese state – and their emotional reunion
One night in September 2009, a widowed mother in Texas named Marsha was up late at her kitchen table, scrolling through correspondence, when she opened an email that would change her family’s life. It was from an acquaintance who was sharing a newspaper article – as it happens, an article I’d written from China – about government officials who had snatched children from impoverished families to supply the lucrative adoption market. The article featured an interview with a nine-year-old girl speaking wistfully about her identical twin who had been taken…
The sweet story of how a chance meeting led to Australia’s ‘old baby cake’ going viral on Chinese social media
When Paul Adam sees a long queue forming in front of his patisserie in the northern suburbs of Sydney, “That’s when I know I’m going to start working hard,” he says. In the weeks since one of his cakes went viral across several Chinese social media platforms, that has been nearly every day. The gluten-free hazelnut, meringue and chocolate mousse cake, with lorikeets stencilled in icing sugar on top, is, by Adam’s estimation, “only a cake” but it seems to mean much more to the customers queuing for it, some…
Yolo review – smash-hit Chinese boxing drama is a tale of personal transformation
Jia Ling writes, directs and stars in this boxing drama with a twist: there’s not really very much boxing in it. In this smash hit from China, we’re introduced to Du Leying (Jia) as a no-hoper; the perspective, in fact, of the supporting characters and the film itself is that it would be hard to imagine a bigger loser. She’s 32, lives at home, doesn’t adhere to traditional beauty norms (particularly as regards body weight), and her boyfriend is cheating on her with her best friend. When this affair is…
The Last Year of Darkness review – candid and intimate dive into Chinese club culture
Ben Mullinkosson is a film-maker and skateboarder from Chicago who brings an effortless, freewheeling intimacy to this immersive and sensual study of the underground club scene in Chengdu in central China. The title is enigmatic, but it seems to refer to the imminent closure of a club called Funky Town where his subjects have been hanging out; the darkness is the club’s darkness, which is enfolding and welcoming and reassuring, a neon-detailed night in which nothing matters but youth, beauty and the pleasure of the moment. Mullinkosson is utterly at…
My path to inner peace, via ‘Dalifornia’ in southwest China
Nine months after I moved to Dali, in the autumn of 2020, I finally set off to climb Cangshan, the high mountain which towers over this valley in southwest China. Each morning, I had looked up at the top of its imposing ridge line, 2,000m above the village of Silver Bridge, north of Dali’s historic old town, that for a while I called home. Eighteen glacial gorges separated the 19 peaks, each carved by a running stream. Ever since moving there, I had fantasised about standing on top of that…
A Christmas that changed me: I dragged myself to work – and had one of the best moments of my life
I spent the Christmas of 1998 in Wuhan, working as an English teacher. Everyone has heard of this Chinese city now, thanks to coronavirus, but back then the name meant nothing to much of the world. My knowledge was certainly scant when I arrived in February of that year. Nothing could have prepared me for the heat and humidity of a Wuhan summer, and the odour of fermented tofu deep-frying outside the university gates at 7am certainly took a while to get used to. Ten months later, however, I’d got…