Micah Sittig - China, Shanghai, Books

June 2, 2006

Via Virtual China's del.icio.us links, "Expert Roundtable 6: Chinese and Indian Youth":

For the first time, it is O.K. in India for a kid to say that he or she wants to be a theater person, a singer, a fashion designer, a writer, a cricket player as a profession without parents losing sleep. It also means that they had multiple choices to pick up a role model. For the first time in India, business is not a bad word. It is O.K. to be a businessman. When I look at young people around me, I see more hope than helplessness. More aspiration than angst.

When I look around Shanghai, I see the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction: everyone is pushing kids to be businessmen, and the parents of kids who want to be singers, fashion desingers, writers or [soccer] players cannot sleep well at night.

Case in point: Jodi told me that everybody who she tells about our upcoming marriage asks us if we have bought a house yet (financial security uber alles). I thought people wouldn't apply this expectation to me because I'm from a different culture, but just yesterday my language partner at work asked me the exact same thing when my wedding plans came up.

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June 6, 2006

Click on the right-hand-side icons of Hello Pizza's message boards. It's like QQ animations, but for the web! (requires Flash)

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June 21, 2006

Let's say you go to western China to study how minorities use the internet. And then you find that they don't.

In the nearest town, Gyalthang town (Shangri La), which is half an hour away on a bicycle, there are a few Internet cafés. Sometimes Lhamo would go with me to the Internet café and one day I had an email account set up for her.

Ahh, now we have a subject for our study. How nice! Smells like good ol'-fashioned last-century anthropology. (I'm just sayin' that's the impression that I get. I don't really have a clue what's going on there. Obviously they have Tibetan language capabilities on the computer and stuff. This entry just means I'm really curious about the study, in a good way. Honest.)

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