at home in…, w| Gerald Zhang-Schmidt

From the archives of my time in China, one for the “Odd Saturdays“… some collective dancing – or does that qualify as soft aerobics? The better question, though, may be why we in the West see such pastimes as collectivist and somehow whack, while going to the disco and dancing in individualistic confusion. And, what’s [...]

In the spirit of my small series of “Odd Saturday” posts on (inter)cultural oddities, things that seem perfectly normal in one cultural context, and very strange in another, a little video view into part of the Chinese attitude towards gender.

Since I got to China, the dichotomy between what the country feels ike from the outside and how things are when you are inside has often struck me. Going just by the reports, China would seem to be a single-party autocracy strictly controlled, without freedom, without law. So, get Beijing to recognize (the Western definition [...]

If you want to save lives, maybe you want a life jacket; if it’s the rapture, maybe you want to get busy… and when you get simple things, put into a different context, you may get lots to think about. Case in point: vending machine on a wall at Changsha’s Hunan University. #1: China’s sometimes [...]

Maybe I shouldn’t even be calling that odd; advertisements are often strange, after all. When cultural/religious ideas from different places collide in advertisements, there are things that you could let slide, or can wonder about a lot. The very association of Eden with a city, if you want to think about it…