Here’s the classic story of a man who lost his phone in New York’s East Village only to discover — due to a stranger’s pictures appearing on his photo stream — that the phone is still alive, though halfway across the world. This is undoubtedly the cross-culture social media story of the year, featuring Avril Lavigne, firework pics (iPhones have amazing cameras, never forget), and a human flesh engine search initiated by Chinese netizens.

Phone update: People in China are helping me find orange tree guy. They’re onto something: http://t.co/RLUEZ2k6z0 pic.twitter.com/OOsY2v94Qh

— Matt Stopera (@mattstopera) February 19, 2015

This story is going to be a classic, anyway. Go read it…

The next day, I went to the Apple Store and tried to explain to them that pictures from some guy in China were showing up on my phone.

They were confused. I got sent around the store until some guy made me log into my iCloud account.

Sure enough, there was my old iPhone on network.

That was it. There it was. My stolen iPhone had gone from the East Village to China. Incredible.

…and stay tuned.

Who Is This Man And Why Are His Photos Showing Up On My Phone? (Buzzfeed)

CCTV recently published an article called “Tips for Chinese choosing an English name,” which is frankly exactly the type of piece I think CCTV should be publishing more of. It features delightful sentences such as, “Many Chinese like to pick names that are in fact, not names,” and, “Meanwhile, Dong and Wang is used as slang for male genitalia. So avoid anything like ‘Bunny Wang’ at all times.” It got us thinking: what are the best Chinese-chosen English names we know?

My favorite has, since the beginning, been “Refrigerator.” I don’t even remember the story anymore, but the name itself has branded itself into my brain. I will carry Refrigerator, capital R, to my grave, long after I’ve forgotten my first love or the smell of bacon or any number of actually worthwhile things.

I canvassed a few other BJC contributors, and here’s what they had to say:

Fish was called Fish because her Cantonese name sounded like Fish. Which happens to sound like “bruise,” and she played rugby and always got bruises so she thought Fish would be appropriate. She captained one of the rugby teams in HK.

Laughter I met once through a friend. Didn’t speak English very well, went to local high school in HK, kind of just putzed around and worked odd jobs. But she said she liked to laugh and make people laugh.

Success was a fat Chinese man who carried around an umbrella and we all thought he resembled the Penguin from Batman.

Bamboo was a bao’an for my old neighborhood. Then he texted me sexual messages.

Rambo. Not much of a story, just met a kid named Rambo… never learned why. Then there was…

Salad. Don’t know there either, was a one-time class I taught. Oh, and there was…

Titanic. Ha. You can probably guess why on that one.

What are your favorite English names chosen by non-native English speakers? Sound off in the comments below. We’ll bump our favorites up here.

Update: Vitiligo, n.: a skin disorder characterized by smooth, white patches on various parts of the body, caused by the loss of the natural pigment.

Plus Whiskey and Trouble, yet another Fish, etc. Scroll down for more.

Driving in China can be a pain, for reasons I hardly need to list here (but will, since Web Logs were created for just this sort of venting) – traffic, severe traffic, traffic caused by fights between traffic cops, traffic regulations, traffic accidents…. Luckily, China’s Ministry of Public Security has an extensive test to prepare this country’s would-be drivers for the stress, frustration, and Weltschmerz of the road…

Behold the ministry’s new driving test questions, which went into place last year, as brought to us by the website Chinese Driving Test. Some samples:

Before we continue, a quick note that this is a real test with questions that are very much not a joke. As the creator of the website emailed us in reply to a question, “Sadly [this site] is not supposed to be hilarious or satirical, but perhaps it should be.”

Of course, according to some, the test apparently isn’t this easy and stupid. As NPR’s Frank Langfitt wrote in January (about flunking the test three times): “The night before my test, I decided to take a practice one online. There were 100 questions drawn from a pool of nearly 1,000. You had to get 90 correct to pass. I got a 65 and started to panic.”

The site Chinese Driving Test includes 973 sample questions, which might make for fine study material. For more information:

The Chinese driver’s test comprises 100 questions randomly selected from a pool of over 900. You will be given forty-five minutes in which to answer all the questions and you need to score 90 or more to pass.

The first forty questions require you to give a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer to a given statement. The remaining sixty questions are multiple choice with four options.

Note that new motor vehicle driver training teaching and examination syllabus came into force on January 1, 2013. It makes for painfully dull reading but if you really want to see it, here it is. (If the syllabus isn’t boring enough for you then head over to the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Road Traffic Safety.)

(H/T Hannah L.)

Take all my money, please don’t eat me.

“Face bikini” found in Qingdao. “The mask, which is used to block the sun’s rays and jellyfish in the sea, is particularly favored by middle-aged women,” says China Daily. [Asianewsphoto]

There was a Dutch website called Beautiful Agony that asked people to upload videos of their orgasm face as a “multimedia experiment.” This was done in the name of art. There was a video we watched in high school biology of a live childbirth, PBS Nova’s The Miracle of Life. This was done in the name of science. Now there’s a reality show on Shenzhen Television, “Laiba Haizi” (Come On, Child), that shows the faces of women in labor. This is done in the name of…

Love?

Journalism professor Wang Zhenjun said the show is a good attempt as it stresses the greatness of a mother’s love…

That’s from ECNS.cn, which also reports:

The one-hour show, “Come on, my baby,” debuted on China’s Shenzhen Television on the eve of Mother’s Day. Some people praised it as an ode to mothers who suffer to give birth to their children. While others, after watching the women in labor pains, said the show is disturbing and might be an invasion of privacy.

The show records the process of three women’s childbirths. Sixty-four cameras are installed in operating rooms, patient rooms and rest areas of Red House Hospital, the busiest women’s hospital in Shanghai.

Are you willing to watch?

What the cameras also capture are bloody and painful pictures of women in agony, close-ups of their facial expressions, screams and wails.

I’ll take The Real Housewives of Miami instead, please.

Other netizens were apparently horrified as well. China Daily:

Netizens expressed horror online.

“It was terrifying to see the mother’s tummy cut in a second during the C-section. …Can I say I do not want to give birth? I was so scared that I cried,” a netizen called Xu Xiaoguai’s Happy Time wrote on her micro blog on Friday night.

Better than forced abortions, at least. Population control advocates may have found their best tool.

National Hugging Day has long passed, but a feel-good story like the following needs no time hook. Here’s Didi Kirsten Tatlow writing in NYT’s Sinosphere:

Recently, it seems like everyone is hugging. Friends are hugging. Family members are hugging. In hugging between Chinese and non-Chinese, it was non-Chinese who once foisted physical affection on the Chinese. Today it may be a Chinese initiating contact. The tables are turning.

Aww.

Or, “Oh shit!”

Depending on who you are.

Most friends I’ve asked say the change is due to exposure to the West, especially huggy North America. But other Asian nations — even formal Japan — may also be involved, according to a recent article in China Daily headlined ‘‘Students Use Hugs to Ease Tensions.” It described ‘‘hugging activities’’ between a group of Japanese studying in Beijing and Chinese passers-by, in which the students hugged about 200 Chinese in an effort to warm feelings between people of the two nations sparring over territory in the East China Sea.

The initiator, Watanabe Kohei, said, ‘‘The Chinese were a bit shy in giving hugs,’’ but friendly.

The article’s next sentence is, “Not everyone is joining in,” so it’s not all warm and fuzzy. It is mostly though. If you need a guide on how to hug, try this wikiHow, or make friends with a North American.

But please remember: don’t hug little girls in the bathroom with a water bottle in your pants…

More Hugs Please, We’re Chinese (Sinosphere)

Japochi = Japanese or Chinese. This is a thing that exists.

I did not do well. What’s your high score? Impress us in the comments.

(H/T Kevin Collier)

This might look ridiculous, but it’s actually the most sensible work schedule the Chinese government has released in recent memory. I mean, compared to this past year…

Plan ahead for those holidays, folks. You’ll be working on days you probably think you shouldn’t be.

The above is via Wall Street Journal. The below is from chinaSMACK, which also translated some netizen comments. One example:

Chinese New Year’s Eve, 6pm, got off work. I drove my car trying to get home. My car was stuck in the parking lot for half an hour, stuck in traffic on the streets for two hours, stuck in traffic on the ring road for 3 hours… Upon opening the door [at home], my daughter lay alone on the sofa hungry and asleep, and from the television I heard “We’ll see you next year! Unforgettable~ Tonight~ Unforgettable! Tonight~~~~” Watching the harmonious and jubilant singing and dancing on TV, I shed a tear of happiness and joy -0

Longtime China fellow Brendon O’Kane may have left for grad school in the US, but he’s still sporadically China-blogging, now on a Tumblr. He’s responsible for finding the above ad, which we can’t thank him enough for translating:

ATTENTION ALL MEN

Foreskin too tight, or of unwelcome length?
These features can vary from person to person.
Jobs, study, and overwork all sap your strength,
And then sickness and germs can cause matters to worsen.
Strange odors and red lumps are commonly seen.
Your foreskin’s to blame! It’s as long as a tortilla!
Alas, alack — what’s a guy to do?
Dongda Anus and Intestine Hospital will see you through
With its circular slicing techniques from Korea.
No pain! No scarring! Critics cheer!
Your embarrassing ailments all will disappear
And your partner of the opposite sex will smile from ear to ear.

Where is this Dongda Hospital?
Why, just to the south of Lantau Shopping.
8563-9299; give us a call
For health and happiness unstopping.

Alas, alack – what’s a guy to do? / Dongda Anus and Intestine Hospital will see you through. 

Poetry for our age, ladies and gentlemen. Well, mostly gentlemen.

[朝三暮四] (h/t Peter Behr)

Authorities in Beijing’s have reportedly used concrete to seal off wells that had served as makeshift homes for migrant workers in a particularly impoverished area in Chaoyang district. Hug China reports:

66-year-old migrant woman Quan Youzhi from Henan province has lived in the well for years. But she will not be allowed to live there any more as Beijing officials have sealed it up with concrete after media attention to this group of well dwellers.

Sorry, back up a second. What do you mean “well dwellers”?

Living in wells is apparently what some people do. Hug China again:

A report by Beijing Morning News on Thursday that several wells in downtown Beijing have been used as home by some old couples and migrant workers for years has caused sensation in China with all major online news portals putting up the story as headline.

…In one well, a couple in their seventies that make a living by begging had lived there for five to six years. In another well, a 53-year-old man with the surname Wang who earns his living by collecting scraps said he had lived there for 20 years to save the bed rent (not apartment rent of course) that normally costs 300 yuan per month in an  area where apartment price has rocketed to 40 to 50 thousand yuan per square meter.

Local residents said more than 20 wells in the area had been used by poor people as homes and the well dwellers are mostly migrant workers making a living collecting scraps or washing cars.

So what did police, part of that caring arm of the nation-state whose duty is to serve and protect, do to help after the public expressed shock and sympathy?

Instead of helping the well dwellers to find a better shelter while letting them earn money in the city, just one day after the Beijing Morning News report, officials from Chaoyang district dispatched workers to the area and sealed off all the wells with concrete.

Yup, they sure did. In a country that values the concept of “face,” this story comes as a surprise. As if living in a well wasn’t demeaning enough, these people are given absolutely no face by being kicked out of their wells. Yeah. What do you think the cops’ parting words might have been, for maximum insult? “Go live with rats” is out, since, you know, these people were already living inside wells. “Go live somewhere less filthy, you degenerates”?

Beijing officials hate marginalized people living in wells, seal them off with concrete (Hug China)

One of O. Henry’s most famous stories is “The Last Leaf,” a tale of hope, perseverance, and sacrifice. In it, a young girl dying in a New York hospital believes that once the last leaf falls from a vine outside her window, it’ll be time for her to go. “Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,” her friend, Sue, tells her, but she believes it, and so, lying in bed, she counts down the leaves. Five. Four. Three. Two…

But impossibly, miraculously, one final leaf lingers, through rain and ice, against all reason — and the woman recovers. She doesn’t know how.

“Didn’t you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew?” Sue asks. “Ah, darling, it’s Behrman’s masterpiece – he painted it there the night that the last leaf fell.”

In Shenyang, Liaoning province, someone apparently decided to pay homage to Old Behrman’s “masterpiece.” (Note: this is not at all true. O. Henry has been translated into Chinese, but he is not the reason for this next part.) Here’s Hug China with an explanation:

A reporter of Chinanews.com has done some investigation and was told that the ‘green’ trees were actually dead for some time and were brought by city management officers to the bustling street after decorated with artificial branches and leaves.

Some local residents have expressed their discontent at the practice of the Shenyang authority, saying installing artificial leaves on real trees does not comply with law of nature and is prone to mislead children.

They’ve been placing fake green leaves on Shenyang’s trees because they believe green looks better. Meanwhile, tourists to Beijing’s Fragrant Hills are killing one another to get a look at the leaves changing color, from green to red and orange. China, right? Contradictions galore.

Shenyang decorates dead trees with fake leaves… (Hug China)

You’ll be seeing this in your nightmares.

Via Shanghaiist:

Residents on Chang’an road in Xi’an were slightly perturbed / fucking terrified when they woke up one morning to find dozens of shaved, disembodied mannequin heads piled up in front of a transformer box.

According to the Southern Metro Daily, no one is clear just how the heads got there, they simply appeared one day. Locals theorised that they may have been dumped by a hairdressing school, or they could the work of some psycho.

The bald one in the corner just blinked, I think.

Heck of a lede by the Associated Press:

Having the dead guy jump up for a drink probably wasn’t part of the script.

Do continue.

A staged protest claiming that city officials had beaten a sidewalk vendor to death in central China went awry when the man playing dead under a white sheet was overcome by the region’s heat wave and sprang up to quaff a bottle of water, state media reported Monday.

“It’s too hot. I can’t bear it anymore,” the man was quoted as saying by state-run Xinhua News Agency.

The Economist’s Gady Epstein reminds that this was a story taken from Xinhua, so who really knows, but if this account is true, it’s yet another reminder that Chinese news can occasionally be phenomenal. “Hair-brained scheme to extort Chengguan goes awry,” tweets Eric Fish. Who needs a poet to write about mice and men when you have Xinhua?

AP continues:

More than 10 men had gathered Saturday with a gurney that purportedly carried the vendor’s body, covered by a sheet, in the Hubei provincial capital Wuhan. They were demanding tens of thousands of yuan (thousands of dollars) in compensation for the alleged death, Xinhua said.

The incident drew 300 onlookers and about 80 police officers.

It was not immediately clear how the group intended to press their claims without submitting the body for an investigation and autopsy. In any case, the game was up when the man — as Xinhua reported — jumped up after two hours under the sheet.

The people should have hired a better actor. This street cleaner, for instance.

China’s heat wave brings ‘dead’ man back to life (AP) (Image via)

The biggest building in the world recently opened in Chengdu, China. The New Century Global Center’s colossal undulating roof, which I’d been eyeing from my apartment window these past few months, is visible from any high point in the city. I hadn’t known what it was until last week, when relatives informed me through a flurry of news articles that it was part of a 1.7 million square-meter complex that is nearly the size of Monaco, and has an artificial sun.

So I saddled up my scooter and took my camera for a ride down south, halfway to the airport, where Renmin South Road stretches into an empty boulevard. One building out-sized the next until finally I reached the climax of the strip-mall crescendo. I circled half the building before finding an entrance.

From about 300 meters away, the new Global Center fades under a midday mist. Photo also in black and white below — the pollution allows about as much visibility in color as in monochrome.

Five fatigues-clad men watched me from their surveillance booth as I parked my bike nearby. “Do I need to take an ID number?” I asked.

“No,” one said, “but you can’t park there. Your bike will get stolen.”

“Then where should I park?”

He pointed to a spot about ten meters away, his official surveillance area.

“You mean to say that if you saw a thief take my bike, you wouldn’t do anything?”

“That’s right,” he smiled proudly, and his friends giggled.

I started to unlock my bike. “Aren’t you supposed to act on the people’s behalf?” (“为人民服务,” a slogan in all police stations, city halls, and military zones.)

They chuckled some more while I moved my bike to the anti-thievery zone. As I walked away, a manager chased me down to give me an ID number.

~

In Medieval times, European cathedrals were built to inspire awe. For a peasant cresting a hill and seeing a cathedral for the first time, it would have been an eye-opening, postively beatific moment.

I admit I felt a little of that while walking under the tin eaves of this building, but the awe was tinged with discomfort rather than admiration. Blank stares from behind service counters followed me as I entered two different doors that led to empty, unfinished offices. After realizing that more than half the building was unoccupied, I trekked to the front of the building to start my walk-through.

I’ve included a series of photos to share the prominent features of this complex — the elements that seem to define it. I’ve never enjoyed going to the mall, even in the US, but the Global Center left me particularly depressed. Rather than displaying China’s new wealth, it was a hollow projection of what commercial developers think wealth should be: big, gaudy, and gold:

It’s a pseudo-Victorian, faux-antique, ultra-Western look. It is this style that has come to define modern China, a knock-off of actual taste. Within this colossal structure, there was not a single trace of Chinese tradition.

Here’s the entrance hall:

If Hogwarts were to sell its castle to commercial developers, its entrance would be like this, with escalators illuminated with indigo lights and strapped to reflective metal sheets criss-crossing from floor to ceiling. Here, the mall is full of people, with benches crowded with grandparents who have brought their grandchildren to toddle around the marble floor. It’s a public park: a space to sit and watch.

Down a side wing stands a four-story bell tower (of sorts): ionic columns supporting a clock that is set to the wrong time. A closer look revealed that this structure is plastered with a cheap, grainy cement made to look like real stone. It is already chipping in several places.

Nearby, a double-door set stands inexplicably in the middle of the corridor:

While Donald and Daphne Duck greet shoppers at an electronics store, banners display sexy foreign women nearing orgasm as they bite cake and sip margaritas. 吃 says one banner, 喝 says another — “EAT” and “DRINK.” Do not forget to consume.

And now, some stores, including faux antique cafes and empty boutiques. A sparkling white cafe is decorated with more plastic shiny things that hang. A foreign woman’s face, this one cartoonish, casts a bashful glance on a wide column, reminiscent of the Starbucks mermaid. Faux-antique chairs and tables sit mostly empty in this massive cafe.

Expensive boutique clothing stores are guarded by uniformed workers. One store sells only black and white clothing. All are empty.

Finally, everyone who has heard of the Global Center know that it has an indoor beach. The Waterpark is currently open to the public, but its facilities are inaccessible. The beach has no sand, and the rumored “artificial sun” was nowhere to be seen, save for the massive glass ceiling that reflected the painful glare of the pure white sky. Pollution was visible within this massive room, obscuring the view of the unopened water slides at one end.

Finally outside again, the nebulous Sichuan sun glowered overhead as I hustled across the shadeless, endless parking lot. The bike lot was littered with pot holes and encased in a rusted iron fence — the Victorian touch had not yet spread to the mall’s far-flung properties. The five men in fatigues giggled again when they saw me approaching. Rather than being annoyed this time, I felt a touch of humanity, as if they were saying, “Welcome back to the real world, did you have a good time in there?”

The experience hung as heavy as the approaching thunderstorm clouds on my ride home. The New Century Global Center remains mostly empty, save for the front corridors, which are hollow in their own right. Questions abound: why create such a place? To what avail? Who will open businesses here, and who will visit? It’s a historic building that China has erected — the largest in the world by volume, engulfing the light of the sun — but it was done quietly, without fanfare, seemingly overnight. Is it a monument to hubris, or humility? Perhaps that’s a question for historians to answer — if this building isn’t, before long, relegated to the darker annals of history.

Last Monday, a curious new Chinese law called the Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly went into effect, forcing the country’s healthy adults to visit their parents on a semi-regular basis. “Family members who live apart from their parents should visit often or send their regards to their parents,” the law stated. (That same day, a court in Wuxi, Jiangsu province cited the law in an actual court case.) But most people say the law is more symbolic than anything, a piece of regulation designed to remind the cosmopolitan, rapidly modernizing citizens of China of their traditional Chinaness, which includes filial piety.

But the legislators probably weren’t expecting China to see their gambit and raise them another full stack of China. In what can only be described as an overwhelmingly modern Chinese response, a service has appeared on Taobao, the country’s online bidding site, for surrogate parent-visitors. That’s right, you can hire someone to visit your elderly relatives if you’re too busy / callous / lazy / narcissistic / gerontophobic to do it yourself.

Reports SCMP:

“One hour costs 150 yuan [HK$190], one day costs 300 yuan,” said Jiang, who gave only his surname and was offering the service on Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce platform.

For that price, Jiang and his wife would visit any customer’s elderly parents anywhere in Beijing. The central district of Chaoyang would be cheaper, he said.

Jiang said he used to deliver flowers, but when the Law on Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly entered into effect on July 1, he tried to fill the market niche.

Of course there would be a market niche, because this is, after all, China, where young folk routinely hire boyfriends or girlfriends to accompany them home to meet the parents. Few places are more entrepreneurial than here, so the only surprise is that it took a week for someone to start this business.

Yet still, somewhere out there, Confucius rolls in his grave, and the King of Loneliness sheds a singular tear. Is there anything worse than growing old to see your children abandon you on the shore of paltry things, the ship to Byzantium receding, aglow, into a distant sunset?

On Taobao, hire someone to visit your parents for you (SCMP, h/t Alicia)