On Friday, the Los Angeles Lakers’ torturous season suffered another calamity when star guard Kobe Bryant tore his Achilles tendon, ending one of his most impressive statistical seasons on a down note. Though the 34-year-old Bryant has his detractors, his work ethic and ability to battle through injuries are legendary, moving opposing fans and Lakers supporters alike to “#PrayForKobe” on Twitter. Similarly, ...

I’m imagining myself walking a fictional waterside street in my hometown of Seattle, Washington. I pass a pregnant Chinese woman, a plethora of designer handbags laid before her on a table. “Sale! Sale!” the woman is shouting. What do I think of this woman? What assumptions do I make about her life in China and her journey to America? What do I think of her after learning she is in the country to give birth ...

Margaret Thatcher, the outspoken former Prime Minister who transformed Great Britain during her stewardship of the country from 1979 to 1990 and inspired the global conservative moment during her decade in power, died Monday from a stroke. Great Britain’s only woman prime minister, the so-called Iron Lady led the Conservative Party to three electoral victories in a streak that was the longest continuous per ...

Like the most quintessential of Americana, chili is not complex -- a stew of beans and tomatos, ingredients that fill the stomach, kick the tongue -- yet it's only with such a square, hearty base that we can sign our culinary art into the slight variances that elevate mere provision into the estimable domain of gastronomy. It is possible for chili to achieve morphology, where degrees of difference are plain ...

Ah, music festival season in China. With the balmy climes and fluffy white cottonwood pollen comes the annual rumor mill about which bold-faced recording artists are slated to perform at the summertime’s numerous annual kickoff events, which have been denied performance permits, and general conspiratorial grumblings about why this is and who's to blame. The controversy has already begun. Kraftwerk, an influ ...

Three Shots With Beijing Cream is weekly series in which local personalities are interviewed over shots. New episodes are posted every Sunday; if you would like to nominate a future guest, please get in touch. Produced and directed by Gabriel Clermont and Anthony Tao. We caught wind of Morgan Short's imminent arrival to Beijing last summer, with our informant adding without equivocation that Smart Shanghai, ...

Ed's note: Welcome to BJC's newest weekly series, Three Shots With, in which we interview local personalities over shots. New episodes are posted every Sunday; if you would like to nominate a future guest, please get in touch. Produced and directed by Gabriel Clermont and Anthony Tao. George Ding, the Beijinger's backpage columnist, catapulted to notortiety last fall ...

Before we get started, let me say this: If you're one of those who reflexively shits on anyone and everyone in the education industry in China, let's just get the hate all out of the way. Yes, there are those who deserve the world's flung feces because they are your stereotypical loser-back-home/asshole-backpacker laowai who drinks to excess (often in class, because "it's China"), whore around like end-time ...

Normal expat whining is grating and graceless, but let’s face it: it has its roots in something that we can all identify with. China takes a lot out of you, demands a lot of you at times. Sure, there are those skating by with an absurd income-to-work ratio, people to whom China is a paid vacation punctuated by occasional encounters with the indigenous people who for some reason haven’t learned to speak Engl ...

One thing I learned about getting invited to a the Beijinger awards ceremony is you first have to leave Beijing. During my four-year tenure here, I never received an invite. Just three months after I made the move to Hangzhou, I was chosen to be an official nominator. Sure, why not. Months later, as an Official Nominator for the Beijinger's 10th Annual Reader Restaurant Awards, I got an invitation to the ce ...

A foreigner in Shenzhen, on the final day of Chinese New Year, learns to call out to the dead. ...

The Chinese Basketball Association playoffs got underway Wednesday, and to discuss the teams and break down the matchups, we've invited the foremost English-speaking CBA expert, Jon Pastuszek, who runs the excellent NiuBBall. Our questions to him are in bold. ...

Years of occasionally reading the Beijinger has finally paid off: the magazine has published its funniest piece ever, and they didn’t even have to write it. Take it away, boys: We are back with a new short story contest... Lord have mercy. You have 140 characters to play with... They had mercy! ...

At the end of every year, the meejah publish lists: what's what, what's hot, what's not, what's frot -- y'know, "Top 10 Worst Celebrity Red Carpet Frock Horrors!" and other such high-water marks for journalism. But being lazy and living in China, we thought we'd wait until the end of the Dragon Year to do something similar. And seeing as we're cheeky and crass, we thought we'd take a slightly different appr ...

Pregame. Sunday for some, Monday for others. Really, really early on Monday for others. I haven't been training as hard as I used to, but you don't pass up a chance to get your fan on, especially when those chances are so few and far between. The Super Bowl is big in America, the one event that brings us all together, even if it's to root for different teams. Then again, the game itself is almost beside the ...

The Beijinger is our fine city's largest expat magazine, purveyors of flour, dogs, hair, and hutong skiers. Frankly, we can't wait for what's next... tissues? turtles? WE HOPE SO. Too excited about the possibilities, we've gone ahead and mocked up some cover suggestions. Let's make this happen, tbj. ...

In a December interview on a Phoenix TV talk show, Jackie Chan made comments that Western media have recently described as "anti-American" -- ...really? I think his comments regarding America are immature, but they're not without reason. What a lot of reporting has ignored is that Chan was speaking in Chinese on a Chinese television channel, and the message he was delivering to a Chinese audience was this: ...

Peeping weekly at the best (and worst) that was, is, and will be on the China blogosphere. Aside from family animosities, hangovers and relief in seeing in another year relatively unscathed, there is little worth celebrating in the Sino-English gulag. Drawing up lists of the best and worst sites is a fool's errand. Ditto content. It is as if this digital corner has been leached of enthusiasm and experiment. ...

BJC's An Expat Christmas series is winding down, but we wouldn't leave without a story from Shanghai. William Childress writes about friends, food, and transience in the big city. By William Childress We're lucky, in Shanghai, to be in a city with so many foreigners that we can essentially experience the holidays as we would in our native land. But don't get me wrong -- we're not exactly in an expatriate ha ...

In the latest from BJC's An Expat Christmas series, Felix learns to see the holiday spirit from the eyes of someone completely unfamiliar with Christmas -- an Iranian in Wuxi, Jiangsu province. ...