User Comments - tsulu

Posted on: Money Values and Beating the Summer Heat

BTW Amber, I am a Chinese teacher and my students and I think that your show is fantastic and very informative and entertaining. My students perfer to listen to you than to someone that is all scholarly. I find your show really helps my students to broaden their prespective. If we wanted something as referred to from the above, we would all be tuning into that drole stuff on BBC or History Channel (if we had those here).

Posted on: Money Values and Beating the Summer Heat

OK, I guess I read too many Chinese papers and hang out in the wrong part of Shanghai. At the grocery store, the book shop and the even at the fast food places, kids are always using plastic! I mean to say credit cards. The papers are lamenting the fact that in China, there are so many people in debt with credit cards, especially the young. But then I heard this podcast say the very opposite. So, either the Chinese papers have got it wrong and I am seeing things or someone is living around too many upper-middle class people.

BTW Amber, when are you going to do a piece on the cost of Chocolate in Shanghai. I found that a simple candy bar was on the average 9 yuan. I took three two-pound boxes of Hawaiian Macademian Nut Chocolates to my friends in Shanghai (US$6 each). They quickly hid the boxes and thanked me later. I thought I had contraband. I later asked why and they told me how expensive chocolate was and they didn't want others knowing knowing that they had that. What a culture shock! I'm not a chocolate person so I have never really paid attention, unitl now. Why is it so costly?

Posted on: Overseas Chinese

Windwalker,

Liked your comments.  I understand your feelings 100%  I am also half Chinese and half British and immigrated to the US, but look totally white (at least I thought so.).  When I go to China, people expect that I am Chinese and should "be" chinese.  I am studying Chinese to try to understand my "cultural-roots", but I don't think that it will make me Chinese.  In the US, everyone expects me to "be" American, too.  What a crazy world!

I also agree that 'nationality' is a very useless descriptor these days.

Posted on: Taipei

I lived in Taiwan for a number of years.  I loved it there, but was very fustrated with their form of pinyin and the way they teach Chinese.  I speak and read a number of languages (Japanese, Korean, Spanish, etc.) and found that it was very damning to the learning process.  I teach Chinese now with Taiwanese materials, but not with the silly phonetics.  My students surpass the standard in Taiwan quite quickly.  Hope Taiwan will modernize their teaching methods and pinyin.