Hey, this is neat: The Illustrated Wok, a recently launched and almost instantly successful Kickstarter campaign from The Cleaver Quarterly, a Shanghai-based foodie mag. Cleaver launched three years ago in Beijing — also on the back of a successful Kickstarter — and has since consistently pumped out visually dense print mags with stories about “dumpling rappers” and “authentic Beijing tacos” every three months. Their next big idea is a cookbook with illustrated recipes from 20 “top chefs,” and it looks pretty cool:
Recipes hinted at in the Kickstarter video include Crispy Peking Duck Leg and Purple Yam & Pancetta Gau Gee with Black Garlic Mayo, and I haven’t had lunch yet so I’ll stop transcribing this stuff now. This thing looks like the perfect gift for the Trans-Pacific fusion-foodie in your kitchen, and the illustrations alone might be enough to sell some — here, a “strange flavor eggplant” being abducted to space, there, an octopus that looks freshly escaped from a hentai nightmare.
Check their full pitch here and drop as little as 25 bucks to have your own Illustrated Wok shipped to you in October or so.
American Dream Park opened in the ’90s, and closed officially in 2001. Online sources say the closing was a result of the park’s long distance from would-be customers, and overall poor management of the project. One day, the whole operation was shut down, leaving the park in pretty much the same condition for the past 16 years.
We’ll have a full report on this spot later in the week; stay tuned.
Do you feel exhausted after a hard day, and just want to flop down and stare at the TV? A routine like this will take a toll on your health and quality of life fast. If you’ve tried to break your lazy habits with the latest motivational fitness app or by jumping on the treadmill, you’re doing it wrong.
We have been dealing with exhaustion, stress and laziness for centuries. The art of kung fu specializes in shattering these bad habits by training your whole being — body, mind and spirit.
If you’ve tried to break your lazy habits with the latest motivational fitness app or by jumping on the treadmill, you’re doing it wrong.
The first records of kung fu go back 5,000 years, with its earliest forms based on Chinese wrestling. Over the centuries, health training exercises called Qigong were created, as well as meditation exercises, which are great for lowering stress and gaining self-control.
The dangers of the ancient world called for the addition of kicking and punching as well learning how to use weapons like the sword, spear and even the chain whip. In all, kung fu has more than 18 different types of weapons to learn.
Even if you’re not in it for the weapons training, here are three great reasons to practice kung fu:
1. Physical Health
Kung fu was first taught at the Shaolin Monastery 1,500 years ago in order to break the sedentary habits of the Shaolin monks. The monks spent hours in seated meditation, causing their strength and energy to suffer. A kung fu training session includes performing high-energy combinations of kicks, punches and jumps to supercharge your stamina, balance and flexibility. The forms have exciting names like “Black Tiger Steals the Heart” and “White Crane Spreads its Wings.”
Qigong — sometimes called “Chinese yoga” — is another important feature of the practice, and greatly helps strengthen both body and mind. Qigong is also referred to as “moving meditation” for its smooth, flowing movements and deep breathing. Popular qigong forms include “The Five Animals Play” and “8-Pieces of Brocade.” These simple exercises and meditation routines have been shown to have a profound effect on stress, health and mental well-being by numerous health studies. Qigong is also a simple way to lower blood pressure and cholesterol.
One tranquility-inducing qigong breathing exercise is called the “calming breath.” It’s performed by assuming a comfortable seated position, which for the monks was the pretzel-like lotus position. If, like most people, you are not comfortable and relaxed while in the lotus position, any seated posture will work.
To perform the calming breath, gently inhale through your nose to a count of 4. Next, gently relax as you hold your breath to a count of 7. Finally, gently exhale through your mouth as if you were blowing out a candle, to a count of 8. Slowly repeat for several minutes, and you should feel yourself getting one step closer to nirvana.
2. Fighting Skill
Kung fu fighting has four methods: kicking, punching, wrestling and joint locks. These four methods will give you a powerful set of self-defense skills. You can practice your kung fu fighting in sparring sessions called “San Da” while wearing protective gear like boxing gloves, head gear, shin pads and chest protectors. You’ll be able to test your kicking and punching combos while trying to throw your opponent to the ground, or right out of the practice ring!
“Shuai Chiao,” a more specialized form of close-range fighting, is the wrestling aspect of kung fu. Chinese wrestling is great for tripping or throwing your opponent to the ground, and is a must-learn skill for self-defense.
Once you have learned how to kick, punch and wrestle, the final skill is “Chin Na,” which is sometimes called anti-grappling. Chin Na offers an effective defense to wrestling. Chin Na includes many escapes, counter attacks and bone-cracking submission moves. Needless to say Chin Na is a vital self-defense tool.
One of the most famous fighters to master all of these deadly martial arts skills was the kung fu master and movie star Bruce Lee:
Kung fu is famous for its tricky footwork and striking combinations. One proven free-fighting combination is performed by assuming a fighting stance, with the left foot in front. First, quickly switch feet as you jab with the left fist (called a switch jab). Next, quickly step your left foot forward and to the right about six inches. Finally, reach your right hand in the direction of your opponent’s face as you kick the back of their lead ankle to sweep.
3. Mental Health and Enlightenment
Self-discipline is a challenge for everyone. You don’t always feel like exercising or eating healthy. Sometimes you just want to eat your favorite junk food and watch Netflix. The surprising thing about kung fu is that one of the reasons it was practiced by the Shaolin Monks was to help them to achieve self-mastery by disciplining their bodies and minds in the quest for enlightenment.
Kung fu truly is an art form, and can adapt to your changing needs and abilities over time. Many people begin their practice in childhood and continue throughout their lives into their 70’s, 80’s and beyond.
One simple practice favored by octogenarians is called “embracing the moon on the chest.” It is done by holding the arms out at shoulder level as if you were hugging a large tree trunk. This is a type of standing meditation where you try to relax the arms as much as possible without letting them start to fall back down to the sides.
By standing for 3 minutes you build the Qi up in the arms, and when the arms are lowered, the energy will flow throughout the body to help keep the Qi balanced and strong.
Kung fu’s lightning-fast strikes and adrenaline-pumping fight training build speed and power. This offers a great balance to the soft and flowing movements of qigong and meditation, providing proven benefits to all aspiring kung fu players.
Take a deep breath in, and exhale out all your bad qi with this meditative video taken around the city of Hangzhou.
Hangzhou is a bit of a contradiction. It’s the site of serene water gardens and temples, as well as home to e-commerce giant Alibaba and other key players in the tech industry. For this video, videographer Kenneth Lee focused on the parts of the city that hold on to their old school charm.
Drones are huge over here right now, but it takes footage like this to help us remember why. The shots are pretty amazing – for a second you might forget that you’re sitting at your computer, and not floating high above the sights and sounds of the town. The footage takes you around Hefang Street, Lingying Temple, and Tianshan Village, all set to simple guzheng music.
Subscribe to Kenneth’s channel for more bird’s eye looks around China.
Happy Monday! This week’s photo theme: weird theme parks.
We’ll kick it off with this candid I snapped yesterday at the City Beachview park near Changsha, capital of Hunan province in central China. As the “central” in that last sentence implies, City Beachview is nowhere near a beach, nor is it really in the city. It does have a large artificial sand beach complete with a volleyball net, though. And waterslides.
I was there with my band to play at the Mango music festival, for which the park drained a large artificial wading pool to make room for a stage and an audience. This photo shows a few off-duty security guards lounging towards the back of the stage, near some metal machines which I assume generate waves when the pool is full.
Zhibo is a weekly column in which Beijing-based American Taylor Hartwell documents his journey down the rabbit hole of Chinese livestreaming app YingKe. If you know nothing about the livestreaming (直播; “zhibo”) phenomenon in China, start here.
Sometime it feels like life is an unending exercise in deciding how annoyed to get.
I know that’s not true for everyone. Some people sail through life on a cloud of optimism and patience and good faith without ever once impugning the motives of their fellow humans. Fortunately, these people – unburdened as they are by the complexities of life – don’t spend a whole lot of time on the internet. For the rest of us, the struggle is real.
All aboard!
Someone cuts you off in traffic, texts during a movie, or – sin of all sins – doesn’t admit that you’re right and they’re wrong after you spend hours carefully crafting that brilliant takedown of their dumb political Facebook post. You’ve been wronged, and all you want is to unleash your righteous fury. You know that taking a breath and letting it go would be the best thing for your day and your blood pressure, but you have a social obligation to inform your new foe how very wrong they are. Really, it would be worse if you didn’t get mad.
Indignation is a hell of a drug. And China can offer a whole lot of it on the cheap.
0.5rmb for the bus ticket, to be precise
Even if you’ve never been to China, you’ve probably heard about the whole *manners* issue here. People spit and shove and cut whatever was passing for a line without the slightest trace of shame. People yell across restaurants at their servers while putting out cigarettes on the tablecloth – but who can blame them? The average waiter won’t acknowledge your existence in a busy restaurant until you’ve broken out a megaphone.
But that all comes with territory — and besides, I’m not here to bitch and moan about spitting and shoving today. The indignation that I have real trouble moving past is the one I spoiled right up there in the title: people being amazed when Chinese comes out of my mouth.
Before I get started, let me be clear on something: I totally get that my indignation is dumb and illogical and both can and should change nothing. The goal here is not to convince the abstract entity that is *Chinese Culture* to change, nor is it to convince you that it should. My goal is to simply to explain a bit about the frustrations of trying to speak Chinese in China — and in doing so, work through the dumb and counterproductive indignant feelings that often result.
Let us begin with the obvious and oft-repeated: Chinese people are not used to seeing foreigners speak Chinese. In a country where just being a foreigner renders you statistically non-existent, speaking the incredibly inaccessible language makes you an aberration against nature (I’m not trying to make myself feel special – this is a simple numerical reality). So, everyone attempting to speak Chinese in China – myself very much included – needs to constantly have this fact in the back, front, and center of their minds: what I’m doing right now is a weird and highly unusual experience for the other person. This is not like going to Paris and getting sneered at for your American accent; the vast majority of foreigners in China are tourists, followed closely by expats who barely speak a word of Chinese. Unless you’re living with exchange students at a university, you’re (correctly) not expecting to hear Chinese come out of a foreigner’s mouth. So when it does, there’s a couple directions the interaction can go in:
Option 1: Things go nowhere. You don’t have enough confidence, or your tones aren’t there, or the person simply doesn’t process what’s coming out of your mouth as Mandarin. Despite your best efforts, you are met with slack-jawed confusion. If you are with anyone even vaguely Asian-looking, all inquiries will be directed to them.
Option 2: You manage to start a conversation that is acknowledged by all parties as being in Chinese. Something beyond ni hao is exchanged. You communicate some kind of message. Then, you make a mistake. Perhaps a big one, or maybe just a single tone. Maybe you are trying to say that you are from 英国 (yingguo, England) but instead say 鹰果 (yingguo, eagle fruit). Communication is derailed. Your new friend realizes that you do not, in fact, speak Chinese. They ask anyone else around what the foreigner is trying to say and express confusion at trying to understand it (you).
Option 3: You are confident and clear. You communicate what you’re trying to communicate. You nod and say “嗯，嗯，嗯” (like “uh huh”) at the right moments to demonstrate that you know what is being said. You throw in an idiomatic saying to prove that you do, in fact speak Chinese. Your new friend is astounded. 哇，你的普通话真不错! (wow, your Chinese is really good!)They want to know how you learned it. They want to know where you studied. They want to know how you managed this miraculous feat, despite your entire demonstration of linguistic competence coming down to a five-minute chat about the weather or coffee or dry-cleaning or whatever. You are now expected to understand every single idiom, nuance, and proper noun in the Chinese language. Holy shit, you speak Chinese! Roll credits.
You’ll note the conspicuous absence of an option #4; the one where someone just raises their eyebrows in surprise and continues the conversation. I’m not hyperbolizing when I say that I have never once in 3 years met someone in China who didn’t have some kind of intense reaction to my once-butchered, now-decent attempts at speaking their language. When I first got here, it was usually sympathetic laughter and/or pitying praise and/or the above-mentioned slack-jawed confusion. Now that I’ve learned just enough (to know that I know nothing), I tend to get a lot of really embarrassing superficial praise because I successfully got past the “hello” stage of a conversation.
In my admittedly limited and personal experience, there is no middle ground when speaking Chinese for the first time with someone in China. Either your mistakes/strange visage hamstrings any chance of communication or you’re being told you’re amazing and clever and being asked what Chinese university you studied at.
I think one reason this throws my brain for a particularly intense loop is because America and China are just polar opposites on this issue. The United States is a country of immigrants — if anything, there’s an expectation that people either come already knowing the language or have a willingness to learn it. The ugly racist American caricature isn’t someone who assumes a foreigner can’t speak English, but rather is angry that they don’t. You know, “dial 1 for English,” “English, Motherf@#ker, do you speak it!?!?,” and all that jazz. We’re the people who travel around every corner of the globe expecting every sign, guidebook, and menu to be in our native tongue, after all. Meanwhile, the Chinese kill you with (seemingly condescending, but usually quite sincere) kindness; I’d totally understand if everyone berated me over my lack of fluency, but instead everyone coos and pats me on the head for managing to say hello without tripping and breaking my neck.
The ugly racist American caricature isn’t someone who assumes a foreigner can’t speak English, but rather is angry that they don’t
And as with all things, the internet (and YingKe) amplifies this phenomenon. I’ve mentioned before that I get asked where I’m from and about my relationship status a fair bit, but not a single message comes across that screen more than some version of “Do you speak/read/understand Chinese?” This used to put me at somewhat of a loss. Being a bit chatty (the same way the surface of the sun is a bit toasty), I’m basically never not speaking Chinese while streaming. It takes at least 30 seconds to enter my stream, register what you’re seeing, and type out a question in Chinese characters (for reasons I’d be happy to explain another time, typing in Chinese is quite a bit slower than typing in English). In that time, I’ve probably rattled through a dozen answers to the question of where I’m from, complained about the smog a few times, and apologized to several people whose names I’ve butchered. I know I’ll never have a real sense of just how awful my accent sounds to Chinese ears, but I know that at least a few thousand people understand what I’m saying because they react to it.
So let me ask you this: if you saw someone live streaming (or just like, in life) and they speaking in rough, accented English – even if you didn’t understand a decent chunk of what they were saying – would it ever occur to you to ask them, “hey, do you understand English?” Or better yet, “oh my god, YOU SPEAK ENGLISH? WOW!!!”
This is, of course, the point at which the *cultural difference* card is usually hurled onto the table with a resounding thud. China is a (somewhat) uniquely homogenous culture. China’s long history – despite being punctuated by a few periods of cosmopolitanism – has involved remarkably little interaction with the outside world and even less immigration. Chinese is a (mostly) uniquely difficult language to learn even for native speakers and that’s mostly owing to the writing system (i.e. the part I have to be good at to stream and read messages). There are very few foreigners in China, even fewer of them speak Chinese, watching a foreigner speak Chinese is really weird, the Western concept of political correctness hasn’t ever really taken any serious hold in China, etc., etc., etc. ad infinitum.
I get it.
It still feels annoying.
It still feels insulting.
It still gets the little indignation goblin in the corner of my brain jumping up and down, stamping his feet and screaming, OF COURSE I CAN UNDERSTAND CHINESE, I’M IN CHINA, STREAMING ON THE CHINESE INTERNET, LITERALLY SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE. I’VE GIVEN SEVERAL YEARS OF MY LIFE TO TRYING TO ACHIEVE SOME MODICUM OF SUCCESS WITH THIS IMPOSSIBLE GODDAMN LANGUAGE, CAN YOU PLEASE JUST GIVE ME 15 SECONDS OF THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT BEFORE YOU UNLEASH YOUR *ALL FOREIGNERS ARE DUMB* STEREOTYPES AT ME?!?!?!?
But of course, just writing that rant down highlights several serious gaps in the goblin’s (my) logic. No one watching my stream knows that I’ve given years of my life to this. No one owes me the benefit of the doubt. When a checkout person at a store refuses to acknowledge my Chinese and gestures repeatedly at the total on the register, they’re just using pattern recognition. Ignoring something in front of their face, perhaps, but utilizing the same kinds of heuristics we all do to get through the day. Same goes for the waiter who asks my confused Korean friend what the foreigner wants, the couple on the subway who start talking about me out loud, and of course (my personal favorite), the barista who goes to get her friend who *speaks English* no matter how many times I call after her quickly-receding figure that “我只想点一杯咖啡!” (I just want to order a cup of coffee!!)
The indignation goblin does not, I think, have my best interests at heart. One of the funniest and wisest teachers I’ve ever had once told me that “indignation is the pain of self-doubt,” and I don’t think anyone has ever been more right about anything. Every time I roll my eyes at someone who asks me *in Chinese* if I understand Chinese, I’m feeling that little stabbing anxiety that I’ll never be fluent, that I’m wasting my young adult years in Beijing, that [enter existential crisis thought here]. So for the purposes of YingKe at least, I’ve landed on a snarky kind of self-deprecating humor as the solution. When someone asks for the 150th time that hour if I can read Chinese, I launch into a tirade about how foreigners could never possibly develop big enough brains to comprehend the ancient language of the emperors owing to their poor diet of Big Macs and KFC. Generally speaking, the person who asked in the first place laughs and tells me I’m doing a good job of overcoming my natural handicap.
There are already noticeable results; I have plenty of regular viewers who first entered my 直播间 (live streaming room) and expressed the same shock/confusion over what language was coming out of my mouth. Now, they’re part of an ever-growing group who crack jokes at how silly that all is.
I see ripples in my tiny little pond. But to be fair, it’s hard to tell what’s going on in here with all the pollution.
