Starting on April 10th, Beijing will be receiving planefuls of improv performers flying in from all over the country, and the globe as well. In addition to troupes from places like Shanghai, troupes will be coming Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, and even as far as Turkey to perform for Beijingers over a monster two-week improvaganza. My own troupe […]

It’s not every day that you get to Skype a complete stranger to tell them they’re in the New York Times and didn’t know about it, but that’s what I did this afternoon when I called up Jingchen Wu. Last month I wrote about the NYT article featuring comedy from all over the world, including […]

I keep running up against this unfortunate truth when trying to describe Xiangsheng to westerners: Xiangsheng is in Chinese. People can’t understand it. Moreover, the reason people can’t understand it is more than linguistic one. It’s a cultural issue. The content of Xiangsheng is inherently Chinese. Consider the piece “Little Children” that I have learned […]

Beijing contains quite a few bookish people, and many who (like me) find there to be no more comforting place to be than in a bookstore. In China, a bookstore like The Bookworm, in Sanlitun, stocked with the best English and Chinese language books around, is an oasis of sorts from not only the hectic […]

Last fall I purchased an electric bike so I could do my part keep the streets of Beijing as terrifying as possible. It came with a battery that was so heavy it almost threw out my back to lift: it was the size and weight of a mini-keg. I learned to sling it over my […]

Comedy is culture, and my favorite way of defining culture is as the answer to the question: “How do we do things here?” Because I spend my time in Beijing, studying the way Beijingers walk (fast, with little regard for traffic lights or other pedestrians), the way Beijingers speak (fast fast fast and then sloooow, […]

I arrived back in Beijing after three and a half weeks away, across oceans in America and then straits in Taiwan. While on vacation, I reminded myself constantly that even though the air is sometimes lousy and traffic unceasingly loud, Beijing is the center of the Chinese Xiangsheng world—the heartland of the comedy style I […]

  These past two weeks I have been in Taiwan at a conference for Fulbright, getting a chance to meet up my fellow Fulbrighters from Taiwan as well as see what the island had to offer in terms of culture and scenery. While the latter was breathtaking—Taroko Gorge, in particular, might be the most beautiful […]

This week I’m in Taiwan for a Fulbright conference, and myself and most of the other scholars are taking advantage of the non-censored internet to catch up on the world by reading the New York Times. One morning at breakfast I found myself bombarded by about ten of my colleagues, each recommending I read the […]

For the past few months, a decades-old territorial dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands has flared up again, inciting bad blood in East Asia. Now, I know what you’re expecting. Some sort of geopolitical article, perhaps, about the history and legitimacy of both claims. But, there are other friends of mine who […]