Results tagged “thisshanghaiist”

This Shanghaiist isn’t a massive fan of travel writing. As interested as we are in other places and in travelling, we’d rather experience these places ourselves – we don’t like someone else spoiling all the surprises for us. We’ve also become a bit tired of reading work by Westerners “experiencing” China, given that these pieces often tend to say the same shallow things: China is currently in the midst of rapid economic growth (gasp!); the Chinese eat all sorts of crazy stuff (shriek!); they openly spit in public (run for the hills!).

Everyone is complaining about the snow and how difficult it makes walking dogs, getting cabs, getting out of train stations and how ayi is on holiday for the next couple weeks. This Shanghaiist has been inspired by the words of Doctor Seuss:

“When you think things are bad, when you feel sour and blue, when you start to get mad… You should do what I do! Just tell yourself, Duckie, you’re really quite lucky! Some people are much more…Oh, ever so much more…Oh, muchly much-much more unlucky than you!”

For example, this guy is muchly much-much more unlucky.

Well, 2007 is pretty much over. This Shanghaiist has never really been a big New Year's person, maybe because we always end up the odd one out at midnight or the one that has to break up the drunken fights that erupt. But, in the spirit of the season we have decided to do that traditional (way over done) recap of the past year. 2007 was a big year for music in Shanghai and below are our picks for 2007...and of course this list is biased, memories are subjective to each person and the most memorable shows for me usually tend to be because of personal involvement at some level.

We are all sorry for Wei Hui's misery, but we still loathe her notorious Shanghai Baby—exactly what in this book attracts people? A slutty Shanghainese girl has an affair with disloyal married German man? C'mon, like these kind of stories aren't rampant in Shanghai? When we learned this book was adapted into a movie, we felt even worse. This Shanghaiist, as a Shanghainese woman, thinks this trash movie is going to make the reputation of Shanghainese women even worse, urgh! But when someone threw us this link today, we are shocked to see how well Bai Ling (we don't like her either) fits this character, Wei Hui's book and Bai Ling's acting, indeed a match made in heaven!

This Shanghainese native, unlike many other Chinese, actually prefers not to use many of the cartoon icons when chatting with others via MSN Messenger. The use of cartoon icons could be considered an internet phenomenon younger generations of Chinese. At first it started with Yoyo&Cici Monkeys (悠嘻猴), a launch by Chinajoy at the beginning of 2006 driven by commercial purposes. Later in 2006, the cartoon Onion replaced the Yoyo&Cici Monkeys to be the most popular internet icon. Ironically, the creator of Onion forbade others to use the character for commercial use. Now these bunnies known as Tuzki (pictured) among Chinese netizens have captured my heart.

Are you in the Chinese stock market? No, this isn’t a reprint of the post from last month. We ask because yesterday, both the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges dropped about nine percent, registering their biggest decline in a decade, surpassed only by the sell off the day after late reformist leader Deng Xiaoping died in 1997.

Shanghaiist has always been intrigued by the bits of Western history and culture that seep into the Chinese mainstream — the terrifying, ungodly mix of Buicks, Kenny G, and Da Shan gives us a headache, but is fascinating to behold. Though not quite as fascinating as washing your hair with birth control pills.

Have we mentioned China Unicom is about to launch a pushmail service dubbed the “RedBerry”? Oh yeah, we have, here, here and here. This Shanghaiist went so far as calling it a worthy challenger to the BlackBerry. But, now we aren’t so sure. Sage Brennan from Pacific Epoch uncovered this interesting, albeit somewhat disturbing tidbit:

This Shanghaiist is a Shanghainese girl who doesn’t get near as much attention as the "whiteys" (or is it "whities"?) in this city do, however I/we feel your pain when you've got someone shouting “Laowai!!!” or staring at you as if you were an alien walking down the street.