Chinese

Midweek Giveaway is here for the coming year of Dragon!  This week we are giving away a box of Nian Gao from Novotel Beijing Xinqiao.

The box includes, as you can see in the above photo, a cute fish made by Nian Gao, a Yuan Bao to wish you good year luck of finance and some Chinese sweeties.

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Since my first expat friend back in my university, Kungbao Chicken and Sweet & Sour Pork have always been on my list whenever I eat with non-Chinese people in a Chinese place.  I just assumed the sweet and sour taste is a great bridge between the Chinese and non-Chinese dining culture until one day one of my co-workers shouted “We don’t only want to eat them! Some of us just don’t know what else to order!”

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Move over Desperate Housewives: the “Happy Good Wives Institute” has arrived and claims it can help [wealthy] women wary of losing their marriages, according to a rather oddly placed report in the Beijing Evening News.

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Beijing BISS International School congratulates Catherine Zhang for her great achievement in placing second in the Chinese Calligraphy Competition held in Qinhuangdao. About 600 students, ages 9-12, competed.

There is no shortage of counterfeit goods to be found in China; a simple stroll through the Silk Market or Yashow will turn up pirated DVDs, handbags, clothes, watches, pens, stickers, and more. I’ve often heard stories about how counterfeits tarnish foreign brands and the efforts companies and some foreign governments take to protect intellectual property rights. However, when I heard how fake Yangcheng hairy crabs are impacting the market here in China, I admit to being once again surprised by the lengths people will go to subvert the system to get ahead. In his story Something’s Fishy About Chinese Hairy Crabs, NPR (National Public Radio) reporter Frank Langfitt reveals how the fake crabs are hurting the income of legitimate Yangcheng farmers and goes on to explain how even the official Yangcheng hairy crabs aren’t really indigenous to the famed lake they are harvested from. You can read, or listen, to this fascinating story here on NPR’s website.

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While enjoying this nice and week-long Chinese holiday, here are ten things you might not know about it:

1.    October 1, 1949 is not the day the PR of China (PRC) was founded. The PRC was founded on September 21, 1949. The celebration of PRC government’s founding was on October 1, 1049, so it was chosen as the date for National Day.

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Finally, news that isn't completely depressing (or related to a food scandal)!

Infant deaths in China have dropped dramatically due to the higher number of hospital births, according to the medical journal The Lancet.

A recent report found that newborn deaths declined by 62 percent between 1996 and 2008. The shift was credited not to China’s rising wealth, but instead to the Chinese government.

In 2000, the Ministry of Health started a nation-wide drive to promote hospital births, especially in rural areas. As a result, the government set up a fund to help pregnant rural women make the trip to a hospital. According to official numbers, almost nine million women got such help in 2010. 

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My daughter Julia, (10), and I went to the Roundabout Charity Book Fair at the British School of Beijing in Shunyi last Saturday, September 17.  There were a large selection of books and both Julia and I each bought an arm full of great reads.  Our family loves to read – you don’t have to twist my arm to go to a book fair – but it felt good to buy something for a good cause and knowing that we were helping someone in need.

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Think good help is hard to come by these days? Well, it won’t get any better.

According to Yin Jianfeng, general manager of a high-end nanny agency called Beijing VeryMaids Inc., expat families face stiff competition from the growing Chinese middle and upper class.

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Summer is over and school is back in session, but that does not mean that our iPads and smart phones cannot be used as educational tools to assist our children as they stretch their minds. So here are a few storybook apps that can assist your kids (and even us parents) in learning to tell time, master Chinese, and learn about perseverance through muffins. Yes, muffins.

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