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.
At around 5 pm today, a mentally deranged man from Yishui, Shandong province fatally stabbed two people outside Chaoyang Joy City shopping mall in Beijing. He is currently in custody.
Among the dead is a foreigner. No other details are currently known.
The talk of the day has been Mark Griffith and Andrew Dougherty's brilliant music video Beijing State of Mind, a tribute to this city of ours, set to the beat of Jay-Z's famous homage to New York. The Brooklyn native's Empire State of Mind has, of course, inspired countless spin-offs, about Chinese cities other than Beijing, too.
Drop what you're doing and watch this, Beijingers. Mark Griffith, a photographer and videographer who used to live in Beijing, has just released the fruit of 15 months of work, "Beijing State of Mind," set to Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind. The project was the brainchild of Andrew Dougherty, an expat who'd lived off and on here for five years. Rapping alongside Princess Fortier (in the role of Alicia Keys), the duo take us on a trip from the Forbidden City to the hutongs to the Great Wall to The Place, and so many other places in between that make our Beijing experience what it is.
This week, the latest invaluable pensée from Global Times is “If you are the foreign one.” It’s about foreigners on the TV dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao. “They are too frank and say things inappropriate for match-making talk, which makes them seem alien,” is one choice quote from a Chinese DJ in Beijing. Perhaps this is the reason why “the worship of foreigners has ebbed,” according the manager of a lubricant oil company in Qingdao (your go-to source for stories about frustrated love).
We're launching a podcast! On the occassion of Episode 1, featuring Frank Yu, The Creamcast hosts John Artman and The Good Doctor are here to answer some questions.
Over the last week a number of people have asked me about Internet trolls leaving defamatory comments on this website and others. Even though common sense tells me to ignore them, here are responses in the form of an FAQ:
Do you know who’s leaving these comments? Yes...
We know laowai song-and-dance videos are passe -- thanks, Jesse Appel, et al. -- but the effort in this latest one is simply too rich to ignore. Matt Sheehan -- who you recognize around these parts as the China Eastern airport rumble writer -- teamed up with his friend Matt Allen to write, direct, shoot, and produce "We Livin in Xi'an," and the result is a perfectly outlandlish little paean to the capital of Shaanxi province, and perhaps the foreigner experience in China.
We all know the feeling of losing our cool, but how many of us know the misfortune of having a meltdown secretly filmed and uploaded to Youku, where it gets 390,000 views in half a day?
Check out the above, which happened recently in Chengdu, according to the Youku description. A foreigner, because he almost misses a bus, begins cursing at the bus driver in up to three languages, while everyone else watches in silence.
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... Read more »
