Posts by Alec Ash

The unbearable lightness of being an expat in China – a Q&A with Tom Carter

Over at the LA Review of Books China blog, I interview Tom Carter in the wake of the collection of true stories from expat China he edited, called Unsavory Elements. Tom is originally from San Francisco and has been living in China for a decade. He also did a book of photography based on trekking 35,000 miles through 33 provinces for two years. I asked him about expat identity issues, to try and get under the skin of those “masochistic” enough, in his words, to call China home.

A Q&A with sci fi novelist Chan Koonchung

Chan Koonchung is the Shanghai born, Hong Kong raised author of The Fat Years, a near-future soft science fiction novel about a China closely resembling today’s. He has now been living in Beijing since 2000. In his book, China has entered a “Golden Age of Ascendancy”, after a second economic crisis has crippled the West. But no-one within China can remember the crackdown that preceded it, and everyone is oddly and unnaturally euphoric.

Parting words from Brendan O’Kane

Brendan O'Kane will be a familiar name to many of you. He is a long time Beijing resident, accomplished translator, and "accidental pedagogue" at Popup Chinese and IES. Next month he leaves China to do an MA at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on classical China, and is sticking around for a PhD which means, presumably, indefinitely. As he has far too much good sense to write a "Why I'm Leaving China" post on his own, I roped him into doing a Q&A instead, so I could ask about his experiences here over the last dozen years, his thoughts on Chinese literature, and more.

Hanging out with Weibo's most famous cretin

B Ge (B哥), or "Brother B", has 103636 followers on Weibo, China's Twitter. He posts silly videos of him goofing around, such as pretending to down a bottle of cooking oil on the Beijing subway, or blowing up a condom into a balloon in the supermarket. Today he posted his newest video – featuring, to my everlasting and unerasable embarrassment, yours truly.

A "zero mark essay" from this year's gaokao

In the Analects blog my newest post is about essays in China's university entrance exam that flop, getting no points. Some of these essays fail because they are too rebellious. In the post I quote a student from Shanghai, who in response to the essay prompt the "more important things in life", replied "to be a true punk". For the Anthill I've translated the whole thing.