Futility and Productivity What makes a day productive in China varies. Some things that should be simple are hard. Some things that are hard are surprisingly simple. Especially as Fulbright provides no structure for my time, I often ask myself: “Was I productive today?” This is very different from asking, “What did I get done […]

Last night I went out to dinner with a group of Chinese friends, some of whom I was meeting for the first time. In between amazing mouthfuls of hot pot, they asked me what it was like to appear on TV shows in China. I tried to explain that while filming shows was a lot […]

A few weeks ago, an interviewer from Sino-US.com came to my apartment to ask me about my comedy project and what life was like for foreigners living in China. The resulting article has a twist in that it is written by a Chinese reporter from a Chinese perspective, but in English. I’m not sure who […]

Da Shan and Joe Wong I am not a person who is often star-struck, but this past Monday all bets were off when I found myself on a television show with comedy legends Da Shan and Joe Wong.  We had been invited on the show to discuss intercultural comedy, exactly in line with my Fulbright […]

Three weeks ago I got a call from a TV producer asking if I wanted to perform Xiangsheng on a massive Chinese New Year’s gala. With an audience of 70 million people watching, they wanted to let me perform on a huge stage. I, as well as another foreigner, would compete against a pair of […]

One of the strange perks of being e-famous, apart from the (no) money and (no) women that it brings, is the added benefit of having your very own haters. I love the idea that somewhere, hunched in front a of a glowing screen eating corn chips late at night, someone thought that it was a […]

I wasn’t sure what to say when I was approached by a friend of mine who was still at school at Brandeis to see if I would do an interview for the school newspaper, The Justice. In the end, I’m glad I did, even though the Justice’s readership pales in comparison to that of The […]

Today I woke up early, rubbed my eyes, checked the visibility (gray, as usual) and rolled out of bed. I got dressed, practiced a bit of Chinese in preparation for my first lesson, drank a cup of tea, and began bundling on clothing in preparation for the bike ride to school. As I left my […]

A few weeks ago, Minami, a classmate of mine at IUP, approached my about writing an article about the process I was going through in planning and performing Laowai Style on Chinese TV. The site she was writing for, Tea Leaf Nation, is well renowned and I go there myself for China news, so I […]