View from my Yueyang apartment

Recent Posts

Bravo, Brahms!
2nd October 2019
My brain does not let me down often in Nanjing. I manage to memorise names of colleagues – names like Kojima, Kaylan, Kelsey; and that’s …
Translating and interpreting Mandarin: a piece of cake these days?
12th May 2019
Will modern China travellers ever need to learn Mandarin? Well, as a language teacher who speaks five, I am quite biased, yet would still say …
History of China, part 2: Last Emperors and Mao
7th March 2019
Mao and modern China The last two emperor dynasties preceding modern China, Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1636-1912), each lasted exactly 276 years, and then the …
Mark’s History of China, part 1: from the Paleolithic to the last emperors
3rd March 2019
Beginnings and unification The word ‘China’ is not used by the Chinese themselves, but was coined by the Indians. The Chinese call their country Zhōngguó …
Chinese proverbs 2: “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”
14th February 2019
How to deal with adversity, how to get success, and the funniest Chinese proverbs all feature in this post. William Scarborough collected, translated, and published …
Chinese proverbs 1: “All things are difficult before they are easy”
6th February 2019
For Chinese New year, also known as the Spring Holiday, I trawled through hundreds of Chinese proverbs, so you don’t have to. Most seem lifted …
Offerings and funerals in Hunan: long live the dead
8th January 2019
Offerings to the dead The first Chinese emperor had 8,000 life-size terracotta soldiers (and 520 horses) made and then buried to help him out in …
Mindfulness and efficacy in education
2nd December 2018
One of my go-to threat constructions was always: “Listen! You can […] from here to China all you want, but […]” It’s useless now. The …
Unsettling: Five Notes on Emigration
3rd November 2018
1) Trauma Points There are lists drawn up by smart psychologist that correlate a trauma scale to life’s stress events. The top three, for a …
Of Girls and Ghouls
16th October 2018
There’s a kindergarten where I’ve taught three times now. The first time I came in, the kids broke into a collective minute of inhaling, in …