Pen friends are my favorite kinds of people

One of my many regrets is that I was born too late to be a turn-of-the-century satin-wearing, grape-eating aesthete. I could wear satin and eat grapes all I want in the industrial gloom of suburban Beijing, but it's just not the same.

Life Pulse

Courses on offer from Pop Cooking

Chinese food: 12 classes per session covering Sichuan, Shanghai, Shandong, Guangdong, Northeast Chinese and Muslim cuisines, daily. There are three workshops for different level learners: Easy home-style dishes, 1,650 yuan ($223); popular restaurant-style dishes, 1,860 yuan ($251); delicate dishes, 2,280 yuan ($308).

When the love of food turns to hate

I've been addicted to a Japanese TV program that invites pop stars to make their dreams about food come true. In the Year of the Rooster, 2005, the programmers asked primary school students to vote for their top-10 birds. The host then had to live in a wooden box beneath the branches where the birds would perch. Every day for 10 days, he had to think of a different way to cook the eggs.

Be your own chef

Sandra Cam slices a thin piece of carrot. She carves out a head, two feelers and wings, and a hole on the upper side. Carefully, she pulls the head through the hole. And voila! A red butterfly appears in her hand.

Reviews

Exhibition Witnesses of friendship

Life Pulse

Design of the times

Earlier this month at a cafe in the financial district of Beijing, a group of young people sitting on a sofa appeared to be slightly uncomfortable facing the gaze of the cameras, awaiting their introduction from celebrity Hong Huang. In another corner media stars like director Liu Yiwei, writer, musician and composer Liu Suola and artist Wang Jianwei, were chatting and joking.

Dinner as usual, but cigarettes not on the menu

We had just feasted on a sumptuous seven-course Cantonese dinner and I was about to enjoy my usual dessert - a soothing cigarette - when all hell broke loose. "Do you mind Patrick?" my Chinese friends shouted. I was stunned. They were Beijingers, we were in a Beijing restaurant and they were protesting against me lighting up. This had never happened before and suggested to me that China is changing.

Reviews

Films

In good hands

With small moves of his fingers, palms and wrist, Chen Jintang of East China's Fujian Province makes a glove puppet on his hand spring to life, cough like an old man, or giggle like an innocent child.

Pints, body language and other ways to bridge a culture gap

One word I learned before going abroad was "multicultural". It's arguably the single most popular word to pop up in an IELTS (an English proficiency test for overseas-bound Chinese) essay question, and I got it down. I was able to dissect multiculturalism with reference to diversity, universality and assimilation, even in my sleep.