Candice Lee is leaving China, and that doesn't seem fair for those of us who can't imagine a Beijing without her -- including the bowling league, the annual kickball tournament, those random nights at 4corners or Great Leap Brewing when she would be merrily blitzed from a boozy dinner and talk about things no one would remember the day after.
According to users on Sina Weibo, a newborn was "baked" to death in what appears to be a horrific accident at Quanzhou Children's Hospital in Quanzhou, Fujian province. The child was left overnight in an incubator or a heat pad that was much too hot, searing the meat off her back.
A man from Yishui, Shandong province fatally stabbed two people yesterday around 5 pm in front of Chaoyang Joy City, a mall near downtown Beijing, and fatally stabbed two people, including a foreigner. He was then apprehended by unarmed police in dramatic fashion -- first, slowly backed into a corner as he's waving his knife, and then surrounded, and then taken down. You can watch all this happen on video.
Occasionally in showbusiness or sports, the odds against a performer's success are so stacked that the audience chooses, out of the goodness of human compassion, to root against probability. It's why we pull for Celtic FC when they face Barcelona, or Susan Boyle. I hadn't planned to cheer for the pageant contestants of Miss World China on Sunday at Galaxy SOHO -- hadn't not planned to cheer, as planning these things one way or another would be odd -- but a realization dawned upon me sometime between the rain and the fake applause piped in through the sound system: these girls are all underdogs in their own spotlight. They deserve better.
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.
A Bay Area anchor who works for Fox affiliate KTVU announced on Friday, out loud and on-air, that the names of the four pilots of Asiana 214 were Captain Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk, and Bang Ding Ow.
Here's the thing about teaching English in China: it's a way in. "The people who come for the experience, I feel, are the most valuable people you can have in a place like Beijing because they're learning about themselves, and you never know what somebody might be able to do until they arrive in a place like this," says Matt Jones, an English teacher who's using his years of experience -- teaching "communication" and "culture" as much as anything else, as he puts it -- to start his own school. "If the ticket is English teaching, why not use that ticket?"
Neil Porteous is a teacher who knows how to get things done, and he might be the most dedicated foreign teacher I've ever heard of or met in the Middle Kingdom (more on that later). To wit on my first point, as Xinhua reports:
All 45 students in his class in Shimen High School in the city of Foshan, south China's Guangdong Province, passed with good enough results to access the country's key universities.
Six of them ranked among the top 100 in the province, where 727,000 students took the exam, also known as gaokao.
The character for demolish (or dismantle) -- 拆, chai -- appeared on the Chinese embassy in Washington DC on Wednesday morning. According to Voice of America, the characters appeared three times: on two of the pillars on the embassy's front gate, and on the entrance of an office building.
This happened on the same day as the opening of the fifth annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue, a two-day session between top leaders of China and the US.
We desperately don't want this to be true, but Tsinghua's famous three-year-old cat, who had been adopted as the university's unofficial mascot, may have been brutally killed last week.
This is bad.
