I caused another near-miss accident on my power walk this morning. I’ve mentioned before that white people get stared at a lot in my little Chinese city of 7 million people named Wenzhou.

The residents here don’t see too many loawai (literally old foreigner) and so when they do, they tend to look very carefully as they may never see another. This is even more true of country folk who come to the big city to work. I encounter a disproportionate number of them in the mornings as they make their way to the market to sell their produce or to the construction sites littering this boom town. more…

Looking back on my life as an expat, I tend to remember the funny stories better than the traumatic ones. One story – that could be looked at either way – happened while in Mexico a few years back.

I was walking on an isolated road in the northwestern part of the country enjoying the quiet country atmosphere. A truck passed by me lifting a cloud of the fine golden silt the road was made of. I held my breath as it trundled past and felt the warm exhaust mixed with the fine powder on my skin. The quiet returned and the dust soon resettled awaiting the next disturbance that may not come for hours. more…

Unlike most of the expat teachers at my husband’s school, we rarely ordered food delivered to our apartment for the first five or so months we lived here. Between the fact that most everything is deep fried, over-salted and flavored with MSG, we didn’t know enough Chinese to order food let alone explain – over the phone, no less – how to have it delivered to our home. And, since I work from home, I was happy to make our meals. more…

How much food and beer can three tiny Chinese women, one small Chinese man, one small American man, and one not-small-enough Canadian woman eat and drink? You’d be amazed!

Four of Jacob’s adult students invited us to have dinner with them. The opportunity to meet them for the first time while picking up some Chinese etiquette was just too great to pass up. I expected that we would eat a little food, drink a cup or two of tea, and have some stilted Chinglish conversation. Boy was I wrong. more…

How do you respond to a 7-year-old Chinese girl when she says she wants to eat one of her male teachers? Keeping in mind that she’s just learning to speak English, there can only be one response from my husband-teacher Jacob: “Why do you want to eat Edwin?”

“Because he’s dark and I like chocolate” replies Apple sure that an African-American man must taste the same as a candy bar. more…