One of my favorite books about my adopted home town, Beijing, is called Old Peking: City of the Ruler of the World, written by a New Zealand diplomat. It’s a collection of descriptions of Beijing written over the years (from the 1200’s to modern times) written by foreigners. Some of the more interesting entries are […]
The Masked Swimmers of Qingdao Strike Again!
I can hear the editors in newsrooms all over the world this summer barking orders to their China-based correspondents: “GRAB YOUR CAMERA AND GET TO THE BEACHES IN QINGDAO. WE NEED A STORY ON THE SWIMMERS WEARING NYLON FACE MASKS. NOW!” There may indeed be other news-worthy events in China this summer — a certain […]
What is That?
You know you are speaking to a group of Americans when you use a picture of a bullet train in a slide show and they say (almost in unison), “what’s that?”
Who’s Adjusting to Whom?
After providing a definition of cultural adjustment in his book “The Art of Crossing Cultures,” Craig Storti goes on to point out that when we cross a cultural boundary there are actually two kinds of adjustments that we make. The first is to “behavior on the part of the locals that is annoying, confusing, and […]
Cross-cultural Adjustment
This month I am involved with an orientation program for a group of new arrivals to China. I’m responsible for content related to cross-cultural adjustment and for providing an overview of Chinese culture and society. Yesterday I used material from a great book “The Art of Crossing Cultures” , by Craig Storti. He defines cross […]
My Brief Brush with (non) Olympic Glory
I spent most of the decade of the 1990’s in the northeastern city of Changchun, where I was the director of a program for Americans who were studying Chinese. Our program was a joint venture with a university there, so I and the foreign students that I supervised all lived on a campus. One fall […]
