Li Yang, the celebrity English teacher who is now better known around China as a shameless wife-beater, announced his decision to convert to Islam past midnight on November 6, which happens to be Eid al-Adha, or the Festival of Sacrifice, celebrated by Muslims worldwide. more ›

Kim Lee, the American wife of Li Yang, the self-styled evangelist of the English language and founder of the Crazy English franchise, has filed for divorce at the Chaoyang District People's Court in Beijing, demanding full custody of their three children and an equal split of the family's wealth and property. more ›

We were aware that Shanghai's ladies know how to enjoy themselves better than most, but a report from Women of China that analyzes 2010 census results confirms it: Shanghainese are putting off marriage at higher than expected ages, with the average age for marriage registrations standing at 29.77 years-old for women, and 32.45 years-old for men (though this state of affairs might be different if more costumed proposals took place). more ›

Gong Li, who was only just seen in Shanghai promoting her movie of the same name, has allegedly split up with her Singaporean husband, Ooi Hoe Seong, according to The Straits Times. more ›

If you've ever seen someone playing kaixin's Happy Farm (快乐农场), you've probably wondered to yourself how it got so preposterously named. From the intense clicking, sweating and furrowed brows of habitual "farmers," it would seem that playing happy farm is about as happy as a heroin addict searching for a fix. Besides the usual bouts of anxiety and paranoia over e-crops being stolen or malnourished, it seems that happy farm can also lead to losing your job, breaking up with your significant other, or even aborting your baby. Head over to chinaSMACK for a great translation of many, many more problems wrought from e-farming. Maybe people should get out more, but we'd recommend starting slow: perhaps Happy Farm in Reality? more ›

You know what's a damper on any big day? A Divorce. And so at least one municipality has decided it's not going to let couples unwed during the 60th anniversary. Seven out of ten Chongqing districts have said that they will not process divorces during the eight-day holiday, even as they're getting extra staff to help with the weddings. Supposedly, they can't cope with the "high demand" for weddings and also issue divorces at the same time. Luckily for them, nobody's tried to process a divorce yet anyhow, though we wonder what kind of urgent circumstances would make couples want to split during a specific week and whether it then might be a good idea for Chongqing to ban knives as well, just in case. more ›

Do you know of a marriage that failed after the couple became expats? Karen Mazurkewich, who previously worked in Hong Kong for the Wall Street Journal, is seeking interviews over the next few weeks about how the unique aspects of living and working abroad could spell ruin for the wedded. more ›

Several months ago, we heard about a Shandong woman named Wang Jing who created a website denouncing her own father as an adulterer (report in Chinese). On Feb. 5, a local court ruled that the website, which contained writings denouncing Wang's father Wang Zhihua and his alleged mistress Li Cuilian, was "insulting" and ordered that Wang Jing take it down. In August, Li had filed a lawsuit against the younger Wang. The "insulting" verdict is, we think, less serious an offense than libel. However, the court did order the website to be taken down and the younger Wang placed under some kind of supervision (and we don't know what that "supervision" entails), unless the younger Wang decides to file an appeal. more ›

From the Daily India we learn that China's statisticians messed up in their calculations of the national divorce rate.: more ›

Zhu said that after 10 minutes of treatment Bai's lung cancer had been cured and he would recover quickly. more ›

We already briefly mentioned our surprise Shanghai wedding and linked to some of the cheesy memorable photos from the ceremony. If you want similar keepsakes, you need to get married in Shanghai before October 1 -- the city is discontinuing the photo service. There is nothing stopping you from having a friend tag along with a camera, however. more ›

Here are Miss Chen's qualifications for the 2006 Da Er Wen (达尔文) Award: more ›

Maybe we'll try to hit the MIDI next year, although it doesn't seem like it will be the same. The movie's message is that the festival is getting more corporate -- selling out, as they say -- and that next year people selling homemade T-shirts, buttons and other souvenirs won't be welcome. more ›

Photo by monkeyking taken from the Shanghaiist photos page. To see your photos on our photos page, use Flickr and tag your photos "shanghaiist". Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site. more ›

Phillyist notes a fistfight between local pols that leaves one man down for the count. Jehovah's Witnesses get a Philly contributor out of bed, things get a little geeky with a film festival and geeky gets taken to a whole new galaxy when they talk with the Dragon Queen of the Dark Kingdom. more ›

In China, you expect all statistics to look "big", but, provincial bumpkins that we are, it can still be shocking. This report (in Chinese) informs us that about 90 couples a day (thirty thousand a year) are getting divorced in Shanghai. With that many people untying the knot every day, privacy has become an issue, so now the city has several rules and regulations that the folks at the divorce registration office have to follow. For example, they can only meet with one couple at a time, they have to talk with them face to face, offices cannot be smaller than 30 square meters, etc. If there is in fact a breach of privacy, the owner of the big mouth gets a good dose of schooling on the matter, then gets moved to another office and perhaps another job. more ›

Ready yourself to run to a telephone and call home: The record for daily marriage registrations in the city has been smashed. 1,720 couples gave in to predictability and chose Valentine's Day to sign their lives away. How long will their marriages last? Not long, according to other statistics -- 100 husbands and wives in Shanghai divorced each day in 2005. more ›

• Hybrid cars should hit Shanghai by the end of the year. Meanwhile, about 360,000 cars in Shanghai have received the "green" seal of approval.
• Weddings are up in the Year of the Dog. But what caught our attention was this: "For weddings with 200 guests, the current price is 18,000 yuan (US$2,236), which is 15 percent above last year."
• It is now officially illegal to discriminate against AIDS sufferers in China.

In the context of ever-increasing divorce rates, and with Chinese parents placing pressure on their offpsring to marry, a "Lightning Round" of marriages is the next crazy attempt at finding a VW Passat, an unfurnished apartment in Pu Dong and someone else to help make paper money to burn for your deceased relatives happiness (article in Chinese). It seems that 100 people arrived in order to meet a partner, decide in a matter of minutes if they are "the one", and then marry each other there and then. more ›

After performing at Ark in Xintiandi last weekend, Dou Wei（窦唯) decided to stick around Shanghai a little longer and play one more show at Live Bar on Monday. A true rock pioneer, Dou Wei was the lead singer of Black Panther (黑豹) and is still one of China's most famous musicians, although sadly he's now more well known for his high-profile divorce from Cantopop diva Faye Wong (王菲). He doesn't talk about that, though -- he says he wants to let his music speak for him. more ›

According to the recently released results of a 2004 survey conducted by the Chinese Medical Association and the Chinese Sex Science Society, a quarter of married Chinese women are dissatisfied with their sex lives (surprisingly, only 10 percent of men had the same complaint), and with divorce still somewhat taboo, most of these couples will likely choose to remain in their marriages. more ›

Hurry, Shanghai! It's almost time to meet the person of your dreams person of the opposite sex who happens to be standing in the closest proximity to you! UPI (via the SCMP) reports: more ›

That's the headline China's state-run news service Xinhua used for this story, which says the average age Chinese urban youths lose their virginity is now 17.4, nine years younger than when their grandparents first did the nasty. more ›