Twin brothers Wang Yiwen and Wang Yiwu of Beijing have been celebrating their birthdays together for 20 years. This year, there was a special guest at the party named Xiang Nan, who is of the same age.
Ever since my son's birth two years ago, I have been engaged in a losing battle against my mother over how to feed the boy. True enough, she is a great help. But sometimes I just can't agree with her.
With the light fragrance of the painting ink in the air, the Yang family was busy making 1,000 sets of woodblock-printed New Year paintings for a Hong Kong customer. Five or six of them were printing and binding paintings of figures from the Chinese classic novel A Dream of the Red Chamber. Giving instructions to them was an old man.
Nearly every time I enter a neighborhood grocery store and pick up a shopping basket, I regret deciding again to cobble together a meal on my own. As quickly as possible, I weave in and out of the labyrinth of shelves and freezers, careful not to disturb animals hanging from hooks and shop staff staring off into space.
Wu Song Kills a Tiger (Wu Song Da Hu) is a classical tale of Shandong kuaishu and one of Eric Shepherd's favorites. It is a lively rendition of an excerpt from Outlaws of the Marsh, one of the four classical novels of Chinese literature, which is a popular 120-chapter Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) novel based on peasant uprisings in late Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). Since the story is told in Chinese, flavored with Shandong dialect, Shepherd often offers an English summary first.
Beijing taxi drivers are famous for being talkative. I wonder if they will age to become the world's most articulate group of elderly people. Probably, because my observations have shown that local Beijing elderly people are much more effusive than their counterparts in other areas. They cover various topics, even if no one else is listening.
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Raymond Zhou
Op Rana
Berlin Fang
Zhu Yuan
Huang Xiangyang
Chen Weihua
