Our favourite newspaper Shanghai Daily reports:
HANGZHOU city government is to give Maria Fernanda, a Uruguayan woman who rescued a would-be suicide at the city's West Lake, a "righteous award" to recognize her courage and benevolence, officials said yesterday.more ›
Remember the woman who saved a girl attempting suicide in Hangzhou's West Lake? Earlier media reports said she's American. Well, apparently she's a Uruguayan expatriate living here in Shanghai with her husband, and her name is Maria Fernandes.
Pickpocketing, an issue in any major city, seems to become a developing problem for Shanghai citizens in recent months - and we're not just talking from personal experience (though, sadly, some of us have become recent victims).
Oksana Chusovitina: A mother's love knows no bounds and this is fully exemplified in the life story of Oksana Chusovitina, only one of a handful of women to stay in competitive gymnastics after motherhood. She formerly represented the Soviet Union and her native Uzbekistan and has competed for Germany since 2006. When her son Alisher was diagnosed in 2002 with leukemia and doctors in Moscow could not guarantee quality care, Chusovitina accepted an offer of help from the head coaches of the Toyota Cologne club and moved to Germany. With her competition prize money and funds raised by members of the international gymnastics community, she was able to secure treatment for her son at the University of Cologne's hospital while training with the German team. Chusovitina is the only female gymnast ever to compete in five Olympic Games, and won a silver in the vault final at the Beijing Games.
A pig who survived for 36 days after the Sichuan earthquake on May 12 has been heralded as a hero and symbol of the will to stay alive. The pig, who has since been named "Zhu Jianqiang" or "Strongwill Pig," managed to live on a diet of charcoal and water while buried under rubble. It was discovered last week in Pengzhou city, having lost two-thirds of its weight and now "thin as a goat," a witness told Xinhua. The pig has since been bought by the local Jianchuan Museum for 3,008 yuan and will be kept as a "living symbol of the earthquake disaster."
Several tales of motherly love have emerged and are being repeated throughout several Chinese stations and media:
Some netizens pointed out that this story was the one reported in The First and Beijing Evening News. Both of those newspapers sourced their stories to Tianfu Morning News and they were using mostly the same words. Both newspapers said that the child was about 10 month old. The newspapers said that the child was found underneath the body of the mother, but there was no mention of any mobile phone with a SMS on the screen. The SMS was the most moving part of the story, but the newspapers did not mention it. So the Tianya poster was either making things up, or he was an eyewitness, or he learned it from hearsay, or these are two completely stories. It is most likely that this story was made up, because there was no name, time or place.
We've seen the signs off of Yan'an for years, but yesterday Shanghaiist decided to take one for the team and visit a real dinosaur of a museum: The Shanghai Natural History Museum. As far as we can tell, we have a new ranking contender for saddest museum in Shanghai (and we've been to the Bund 'Museum' under the Monument to the People's Heroes.) The paint was crumbling, the stuffed animals were near the point of disintegration, and most of displays look like they were taken straight out of a 1950s science-fiction novel. We didn't get too close to the dinosaurs out of fear that they might collapse at any moment. That being said, there's something about this museum, schadenfreude perhaps, that made the whole 5 RMB visit worth it.
Li Yuchun (李宇春) — the "androgynous wonder from Sichuan" who was the first winner of Super Voice Girls (an American Idol-style talent show) — recently gave a concert in Nanjing, and she performed in *gasp* a skirt! Now if you have no clue what an earth-shattering revolution Super Voice Girls represented (for the very first time, viewers were allowed to vote for their favourite singer via SMS, causing some powers-that-be to quake with fear) and...
With visions of sugar plum fairies dancing through their heads, the -Ists began to get into that holiday mood. Well, some did.
Being a Mandopop star seems like hard work. Endless promoting, little creative control, mediocre output, a demanding fanbase, a music market that is overrun by counterfeiting and short shelf life. It must get tiring. Wang Leehom is the rare pop star that has not only retained, but gained popularity after 10 years in the fickle Chinese pop business. On Saturday night, he brought his show to a capacity crowd of pop fans at the Shanghai Stadium. And he made it look easy.
So, Chinese pop star Wang Lee Hom says his new album Heroes of Earth is "chinked-out." We wondered if this phrasing would offend some people. "I don't find 'chink' offensive," one Chinese-American we polled said. "I think it's stupid, but I think Wang Lee Hom is stupid." Curiously, this person did seem to know a lot about Mr. Wang: "He's actually American ... upstate New York, Rochester about ... went to Williams, Berklee School of Music ... has studio in Boston ... born 1976 ... MVP of his high school baseball team ... three years running ... little brother at MIT." We interrupted: "You are reading this from a website, right? Please say you are reading this from a website." He said he wasn't. We got freaked out and ended the conversation there. (But from the image attached to this post we can also assume that Wang also likes to ski ... with 1980s hair and clothing.)
Shanghaiist received the same email press release about the new book Billions: Selling to the New Chinese Consumer that Danwei and China Herald did. The book is written by Tom Doctoroff, Greater China CEO of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. And the press release includes a list -- “Twelve Facts About the Confucian Consumer” -- that was "compiled by JWT to coincide with" the release of the book. Are all Chinese consumers Confucian consumers (whatever that means)? Are all Chinese consumers the same? Of course not. But they, obviously, are different than your average Western consumer, and we believe Doctoroff is trying to explain to his (mostly Western) audience just how they are different. We are publishing JWT's list below. As Danwei said, some of the items "ring true." Others can, and should be, contested. We'd love to hear what you have to say about this list, especially our Chinese readers:
Shanghaiist staff (all six officials ones plus numerous groupies) are unabashed devotees of the Super Voice Girls, so imagine our pleasure when we found out that Li Yuchun, the androgynous wonder from Sichuan and final winner of the contest that sent tingles and shivers down the spine of people throughout China, became a cover girl. Sort of -- she made the cover of a Special Issue of TIME magazine called "Asia's Heroes".
