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February 19, 2006

The Old Guard


My grandmother's newphew, my aunt who is the wife of my father's second eldest brother (er niang 二娘), my grandmother (奶奶), and my aunt who is the wife of my father's eldest [half]brother (da niang - 大娘)

Posted by rxu at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2006

妖女

perhaps not the best word to use in Chinese... but I'm short on other words



Posted by rxu at 07:44 AM | Comments (0)

二手玫瑰

二手玫瑰 (Second-hand Roses - though they left out the plural in their translation) played at the 新好运 (New Get Lucky bar - literally the "New Good Luck")




Posted by rxu at 06:47 AM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2006

A Tale of Two Chinas

Deng Xiaopeng loved to quote an old Sechwuan proverb: "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice it's a good cat."

And with it he launched the market modernization of China.

And now there are (at least) two Chinas. And the difference is the difference between black and white, between lunch and dinner.

And so I present - our lunch (which we only happened to eat at because we were starving and it was the first restaurant we hit after being stuck in traffic) and our dinner in (as Bill and Julie so often refrained) "wo men de zhong guo."









Posted by rxu at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)

A 12-hour roadtrip

The trip usually takes 5 hours. Will explain later.







Posted by rxu at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2006

Opera



Posted by rxu at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

don't ask...


Posted by rxu at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)

Government business

Ah, the Chinese art of 'Guan Xi'. I've been getting to know the situation in China by meeting beauracrats.



Posted by rxu at 01:25 AM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2006

Hot Pot part Deux

I came back to China to take more pictures of a Hotpot dinner - what with losing the originals from 2004 with the loss of my laptop.







Posted by rxu at 09:27 PM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2006

Gao Kao


My younger cousin (last year of high school) and I in front of her boarding school. The college entrance exam system is a bit like the Rhodes Scholar applications in that with both, it's better to apply from certain regions. Each region gets a quota of a certain number of students so the score cutoffs for each region are set according to this quota. So some well-off parents send their kids to boarding school in a different region to establish residency there, where the score cutoffs are up to a hundred points lower.

Posted by rxu at 03:53 AM | Comments (0)

China opening



Posted by rxu at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2006

How the other half [of my family] lives


My paternal aunt and her husband and children in rural China, 1984.



My aunt today. (back in center)

Posted by rxu at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

Back in the C.C.C.P.


Binzhou, 1980. A few months before my mother got married. My maternal grandparents holding my cousin. Behind them (from left to right) are my cousin's parents (my older uncle and his wife), my younger uncle, and my mother.

Posted by rxu at 09:41 AM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2006

The old guard

My maternal grandfather - 86 years old - Communist guerilla fighter and the head of a county. There's a long story with him, but I won't get into it.


Posted by rxu at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

Engrish

On the expressway just outside of Beijing...


Posted by rxu at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

Tong zhi, dong fang yi jing bu hong le...

Having only CCTV 4 at home, I've been insulated from this feeling of ... what's the best English way of putting this (Chinese is so much more expressive with this)... this feeling of "Are you shitting me?"

this Communist charade...


Posted by rxu at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)