Category Archives: China

Asian Vegetables vs Western Vegetables

By David Xia | Published: September 3, 2010
No wonder kids in this country won't eat their veggies. Most grocery stores in America sell vegetables that are simply not tasty. I'm getting sick and tired of western1 vegetables like collard greens, kale, and Swiss chard that taste like the fibrous end of a nasty stalk of celery. They're tough not tender, bitter not sweet, dry not juicy. Eating vegetables I buy at my local Fairway (with the exception of broccolini) is like receiving an enema if you've got fecal impaction. It's not pleasant, but you have to do it. Asian vegetables, on the other hand, are yummier, sweeter, and tenderer.

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Also posted in Food | 1 Comment

Chinese Propaganda vs US Propaganda

By David Xia | Published: July 3, 2010
China's Xinhua News Agency started a 24-hour English-language news channel and is about to open a new office in New York City, according to the Times. The Times is once again critical of China. And they should be. China ranks 168th out of 175 countries in the 2009 Press Freedom Index, a survey compiled by Reporters Without Borders. What I don't like about the Times article is its prejudicial sense of nationalism and simplistic view of East vs West. The Times inflated the article by making it sound as if Xinhua Red Guards wielding hammers and sickles are about to kick down the sacred doors of Western media companies.

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Also posted in Books, Current Events, New York City, journalism | 1 Comment

Now’s Not the Time to Stop Spending!

By David Xia | Published: July 1, 2010
Several days ago, I suggested that the current flurry of national and US state governments concerned about budget deficits and reining back spending was a good idea. Two big-shot economists, Princeton professor Paul Krugman and former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson, disagree.

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Also posted in Current Events | Leave a comment

Chinese Government Blocked Me, France Too

By David Xia | Published: June 30, 2010
A friend sent my ever-useful Cantonese pick-up lines post to his cousin in Beijing. Unfortunately, his cousin cannot view it. Damn firewall of China! To make sure it was blocked instead of an outdated browser problem I checked for myself. Sure enough, this blog's restricted in China.

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Also posted in Technology | 1 Comment

My Uncle’s Sleeping With His Boss

By David Xia | Published: June 11, 2010
One of my uncles is a director for a Hong Kong-based fuse manufacturing firm. The CEO, a short, 66-year-old man from Hong Kong, is a demanding boss. Working for him is like being on-call as a military triage surgeon in Helmand, Afghanistan. He often sleeps in till noon, comes home at 9pm, and receives a call from the CEO shortly thereafter asking him to come play mahjong or drink tea. This means my uncle will be gone until 1 or 2am. Sometimes he doesn't come home for dinner at all. He'll go to sleep late and do it again the next day.

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Also posted in Comedy | Leave a comment

Do You Eat Strange Fungi?

By David Xia | Published: June 5, 2010
My mom made duck soup the other day. The recipe is simple: duck, water, wolfberry, and a parasitic fungus that hijacks the brains of insects turning them into zombies.

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Posted in China | Leave a comment

Joules of Wealth

By David Xia | Published: September 22, 2009
During the fall harvest in Fujianm, China, sweet potatoes slices, basking in the noonday sun, blanket entire hillsides.

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Posted in China | 2 Comments

Five Reasons Why You Should Visit Xiamen

By David Xia | Published: August 24, 2009
Located in China’s Fujian province across the strait from Taiwan, Xiamen is a bustling coastal city offering all the usual amenities for travelers with Western sensibilities as well as a rich plethora of traditional Chinese culture and customs.


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Also posted in Travel | Leave a comment

Why I Wouldn’t Live in Hong Kong

By David Xia | Published: August 14, 2009
"For creature comforts, Hong Kong is unsurpassed, but Hong Kong is culturally barren. Living there is something like living inside a cash register."

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Also posted in Travel | Leave a comment

Anime-Comic-Game Hong Kong (ACGHK) 2009

By David Xia | Published: August 10, 2009
I have never before found myself immersed in something so utterly foreign and bizarre. The manga fans I know in the States are mere wannabes compared to the 600,000 plus enthusiasts who flocked to this year’s ACGHK sporting imitation M41 carbines, full sets of samurai armor with matching katanas, and hair of every conceivable unnatural color under the sun.

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Posted in China | 1 Comment

Tai Mo Shan, Done

By David Xia | Published: August 1, 2009
A sign reading "No Trespassing," a ten foot high fence wrapping all the way around, barbed wire everywhere? Sounds like an unambiguous invitation to me.

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Also posted in Nature/Outdoors, Travel | Leave a comment

Getting Away From the Machine

By David Xia | Published: July 29, 2009
There’s a digging machine at a construction site near my workplace in Hong Kong Central. Enormous, cylindrical, and piston-shaped, it prepares the foundation of a new building on Pedder Street by driving a sheer metal shaft at least two feet in diameter into hard, raw concrete. When steel collides with stone, the ground shakes and an ear-splitting clangor pulsates through the air as the threatening piston trembles and rises to strike again. An auditory manifestation of the city's pace of development, the piston slams into the ground again and again – a metronome beating out the urban tempo.

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Also posted in Nature/Outdoors, Travel | 1 Comment

“It’s like all the Mexicans in NYC just stopped working one day.”

By David Xia | Published: July 20, 2009
Imagine every Sunday all the Mexicans in NYC with low-skilled jobs stop working, go to Wall Street or Times Square, and just throw one big street party.

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Also posted in Books, Travel | Leave a comment

Hong Kong Oddities

By David Xia | Published: July 18, 2009
Living for a month in any one place really lets you discover its little idiosyncracies and oddities. I present to you some of Hong Kong's below.

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Also posted in Comedy | 2 Comments

Hong Kong Ivy Ball 2009

By David Xia | Published: July 7, 2009

Ivy Ball is a social extravaganza for Ivy League alumni who live in Hong Kong.  Every summer, hundreds of men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns enter the Grand Hyatt ballroom for professional networking and auditory/gustatory entertainment. Centerpieces of freshly-cut flowers and seven-armed candelabra holding two-foot-long candles tower over guests. A chandelier of glass spheres sparkles above a hardwood dance floor. This year’s theme was “Take a Chance.”

Ivy Ball 2009 flyer


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Also posted in Columbia University | 3 Comments