八八吧 · 88 Bar

Stella So is an up and coming illustrator and graphic novelist in Hong Kong. I recently purchased her graphic manual of old Hong Kong titled 粉末都市—消失中的香港 (City of Powder — the disappearing Hong Kong), pictured above.

She’s also done some illustration work for magazines and newspapers, and she’s recently released an autobiographical graphic novel about day-to-day life (stories are a…

Continue readingFeatured HK artist: Stella So

Chinasmack has a put together fun little photo collection from Tianya of people sleeping inside internet bars (including the photo above).

I remember interviewing Tsinghua professor and entrepreneur Nan Tu once and he mentioned that many university students stay overnight at internet bars in the middle of their train journeys home because it is cheap.

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Continue readingThe internet bar is a cheap motel

From Maria Cereghino at the Washington Post:

The Director of George Washington University’s International Development Studies Program and Cultural Anthropologist Sean Roberts will be available to discuss the growing unrest in Uighur. He has studied the region for 20 years.

The live discussion will take place today (July 8th) at 1 pm ET at the following link……

Continue readingLive online discussion of Uighur-Han conflict

Journalist and writer James Fallows has been collecting various viewpoints about the gaokao (高考) on his blog on the Atlantic. (The gaokao is the infamously brutal, standardized college entrance exam in China.)

I’ve selected quotes that portray various perspectives that I found interesting, or at least balanced each other out.

First off, two obviously pretty-privileged views:

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Continue readingPerspectives on the gaokao 高考

Ani7ime Studio presents, “Brain Water,” the plot according their Vimeo page:

This is a story about mental pressure. In this story,the kids are constantly forced to bury themselves into their endless homework by those giant monsters behind them. The children’s brains are filled with water that can be heated by tension.If a kid is overstressed,the water in…

Continue readingChinese steampunk animation

My friend Charles who flits between Beijing and Thailand had a recent mishap with a taxi driver and a group of plainclothes police in Hong Kong. Keep in mind that Charles doesn’t speak Cantonese, and that the communication channels throughout this story are therefore pretty faulty.

Here’s my summary of the story:

• He was having problems talking to the taxi…

Continue readingA nasty encounter with Hong Kong’s plainclothes police force (updated)

Invoking nostalgia by:

1. Using a painting style that mimics the days when movie billboards were still hand painted.
2. Borrowing prototypical images of Hong Kong’s rags-to-riches past.
3. Referring to both in the copy and in the images the old Kai Tak airport.

Done by McCann Erickson for Cathay Pacific (the Hong Kong airline)’s…

Continue readingInvoking nostalgia: Cathay Pacific at 60

Highlights from Frank Yu’s presentation entitled, “The Coming Chinese Wave: History, Overview and Trends of Online Games in China.”

There are 3 waves of adoption, all of which still exist:

• 2000-2003: licensing / portals / korean-taiwanese games: subscription to local vendor
  
• 2003-2007: China MMORPGs / communities: free initially, monetization from avatars and virtual goods

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Continue reading3 Waves of Online Games in China

Jennifer 8. Lee talks about the spread of bastardized Chinese food around the world, and the origins of faux-Chinese items like the fortune cookie and General Tso’s chicken.

My favorite bit: Her theory how the non-centralized “spontaneous self-organization” of Chinese restaurants across the US has led to more basically-the-same Chinese restaurants as…

Continue readingChinese food diaspora: General Tso, Fortune Cookies and other mysteries