The woes of Chinese street food vendors – by Michael Taylor

THIS POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN RAMBLIN' MIK

It’s 4am. In the damp dark coolness of morning in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, nothing seems to stir – huge expanses of roads are left empty, basking in the unused yellow glow of street lamps. You could be forgiven for thinking that the whole city is sleeping, but if you look behind the huge, developed face of Ningbo, into some of the darker corners and alleyways away from the main roads, you will find someone like Mrs X – who does not wish to be named – busily preparing for the day ahead. She, and thousands like her across China, is an unlicensed street food vendor.

When I saw the word for bra, 胸罩 (xiōngzhào), for the first time I giggled “chest mask, hehe”, as I had only seen 罩 in 口罩 (kǒuzhào), which is a surgical or face mask. Looking it up I was a little disappointed to see that 罩 actually means “cover”, making the word quite logical and somewhat less amusing. Then I came across another word for bra, 文胸 (wénxiōng), the first character meaning “culture” and the second “chest”, which is stranger still.

Close encounters in the rain – by Jessica Levine

As an expat afloat in Shanghai, one of the things I miss most about America is time spent in elevators. I miss the strange, fleeting intimacy among elevator passengers at home, the brief bond that forms within an eclectic group of strangers as you take off from the ground floor — the smile you share in the five seconds between the seventh and eighth floors, or the glare you receive when you sneeze loudly around floor 11-and-a-half.

One August afternoon here, I found that rainstorms can create the same effect.

I finished The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan a couple of days ago, and it was a great read. Even Howard Goldblatt’s English translation had me reaching for my dictionary and searching on Baidu though, as the book contains a lot of directly translated expressions and idioms.

My favourite would have to be 丑媳妇总得见公婆 (chǒu xífù zǒngděi jiàn gōngpó), translated in the novel as “The ugly bride has to meet her in-laws sooner or later."

A hutong community meeting goes awry

The neighbourhood meeting was scheduled for Saturday morning and promised to tackle the Five Great Problems plaguing our housing community, No. 19 Ju’er hutong, Beijing. Separate flyers for the event — one English, one Chinese — appeared a few days prior, lodged in the cracks of our front doors. The Chinese version was printed on pink paper and offered a bit of helpful context. It summarised the Five Great Problems agreed upon in the March 20th meeting — broad categories like “environment problems” and “problems with new arrivals”. The English flyer was more perfunctory, a short welcome letter to an unexplained gathering, really. There were only a few sentences and one of them promised lunch and a tea break.