Category Archives: China

What Is a Trowel?

By David Xia | Published: June 26, 2009
From: David Xia To: CEO HK interns Subject: DID YOU SAY HIKING?!?! Dear fellow CEOs, A question first: are any of the guys bothering with getting a tux for the Ivy Ball?

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Also posted in Comedy, Travel | 1 Comment

Massive, Harmonious Madness

By David Xia | Published: June 23, 2009
A day spent experiencing HK's Mass Transit Railway (MTR) is enough to put any urban-dwelling American to shame.

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Also posted in Travel | 1 Comment

Megamalls and Clumsy Change

By David Xia | Published: June 22, 2009

When I left NYC there was no evidence that the Sun exists. When I landed in HK, there was still none. The first ten days of my stay were filled with cumulonimbus clouds and grape-sized rain droplets. Stepping outside is like entering a sauna or breathing with a hot wet rag smothering your face. The CEOs here are taking three to four showers a day to gain short-lived relief from all the humidity-induced stickiness. Some brief musings about HK:

  1. HK (and China for that matter) is not ethnically diverse compared to NYC. The city’s 95% Chinese.
  2. There are so many mega-malls that look exactly alike. Armies of cleaning staff ensure they are all freakishly clean.

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CEO HK Interns

By David Xia | Published: June 20, 2009
Columbia University's Center for Career Education (CCE) will, no doubt, post on its website photos of Columbia Experience Overseas HK interns who look like they're having way more fun than anyone has a human right to by being treated to free Cantonese food and an open bar at an upscale bar/lounge. (You know Philia Lounge will be a nice place even before you go because of its website. There's no way a bar that's not doing well is going to deck out its website with Adobe Flash and eerie techno music.) But here are some additional flattering pictures of the CEO contingent.

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Kowloon Tong

By David Xia | Published: June 17, 2009
Columbia's Center for Career Education has provided us interns with free housing during our internships in HK. NTT International House is an eleven-story dormitory of Baptist University, which is nestled in the Kowloon Tong (九龍唐) district.

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Also posted in Travel | 1 Comment

“I was picked on at school.”

By David Xia | Published: June 13, 2009
  • airline: Cathay Pacific
  • distance traveled: 8,066mi (12,982km)
  • time to destination: 15hrs
  • cruising altitude: 31,998ft (9,753m)
  • outside air temperature: -49 degrees Celsius
  • in-flight dining: terrible
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="477" caption="Takeoff over Winthrop, MA"]Takeoff over Winthrop, MA[/caption]

My seat in 36A is next to the window in the wing section. My mom once told me the wingbox is the strongest section of the plane, but I later found out it's not necessarily the safest. You can die in a plane no matter where you're sitting. Thinking about Air France Flight 447, I mentally plan out my escape plans for various scenarios: fuselage coming apart in midair (à la Lost), water impact, etc.


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World’s Biggest Dildo Factory

By David Xia | Published: June 9, 2009
It’s t minus ten hours before I wake up at 4am for a direct flight to Hong Kong via Cathay Pacific, and I am as excited as an intravenous drug user who’s won a lifetime supply of needles, to put it mildly. Here’s one reason why: a mere 2.0km from where I’ll be living in HK is a place that once housed one of the biggest dildo plants in the world.

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Also posted in Travel | 6 Comments

Cantonese Pick-up Lines

By David Xia | Published: June 5, 2009
If you're going to Hong Kong, here are some Cantonese pick-up lines. For his female pupils, Dr. Pimsleur gives them detailed instructions on how to turn down advances made by sketchy 80-year-old Cantonese men.

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Also posted in Comedy | 3 Comments

Jedi Druglords

By David Xia | Published: May 28, 2009
Everyone knows China is the treasure trove of bootlegged movies, but few people realize the hidden gems within these bootlegged DVDs.

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Go Ahead, Feed the Fish

By David Xia | Published: May 28, 2009

According to the Chinese lunar calendar, today is Duanwujie (端午節), or the Dragon Boat Festival. Celebrating this holiday includes eating zongzi (粽子), glutinous rice wrapped and cooked in bamboo leaves, racing dragon boats, and drinking realgar wine. I've never drank this wine before. Realgar is an arsenic sulfide mineral, the wine has the mineral mixed into it, and I'm pretty sure it would taste nasty.


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“Life Will Get Better and Better”

By David Xia | Published: May 17, 2009

Zhang Yimou's To Live (1994) makes no attempt to romanticize the past. The film tells the incredible journey of a Chinese family from horrific civil war in the 1940s to the tragic mistakes of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. It tells this story matter-of-factly without unneeded garnish and allows the main couple, Jiazhen (played by Gong Li) and Fugui (the talented Ge Yo), to display for themselves the depths of human emotion and spirit.


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