I’ve been giving photoshop a bit of a workout lately. Here we talk to clothing brands like they’re addicts. As in addicted to hazardous chemicals in their production processes. I do wonder, however, if it would have been better to use a ‘druggy/chemicals’ image rather than the ‘detox’ juice on the grass.
Juice image comes (cc) plasticrevolver
- Foxconn factory where iPhones are produced
- Apple iPhone 4S launch in Beijing
- Phone dials for recycling in Zhejiang Province
China has such a weird relationship with the iPhone. The world is having major guilt pangs about their iPhone habit ever since This American Life did a piece about factory life. Certainly hasn’t put the brakes on sales in China itself though. Frankly, I feel sorrier for the poor bastards in Guiyu who live in mountains of e-waste, sorting through electronic trash that is imported from around the world, for recycling. Their working conditions and pay are far worse than Foxconn factory workers.
The iPhone comes full circle.
Helmet kids on Flickr.
2 Jan 2012 / 13 notes / hutong beijing helmets day china two people couple andy emily
Christmas bicycle on Flickr.
Forget Christmas tree, think Christmas bike! How my friends and I in Beijing got around not having a tree this Christmas.
2 Jan 2012 / 9 notes / beijing china christmas christmas bicycle decoration hutong tinsel
This is the Greenpeace activist coming out in me, but someone should have briefed Christian Bale a little more so that he had a few quotable things to say about Chen Gaungcheng (a blind, self-taught lawyer in rural China). Nonetheless totally bad ass and awesome.
16 Dec 2011 / 7 notes / chen guangcheng christian bale activism china cnn report
A bus-stop ad for Adidas gets a re-edit in Beijing.
Air pollution is a serious issue in China, killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. Coal and car fumes are the two main culprits.
Meet my Chinese flatmates: Open and Fish
Out of all the many headaches that were involved in house-hunting, finding an awesome flatmate was not one of them. I only had two requirements: 1. She/He should be Chinese. 2. They should be chill.
As simple as those two demands are I didn’t have my hopes up. It’s not to say that all Chinese people are not chill, but it is a more conservative society. People party and drink and go backpacking or whatever wildness much less here. They’re always saying to me, “You Westerners are so much more open than us,” which I assume is their polite way of calling me a flagrant, alcoholic slutbag who lacks any shred of decency.
The other issue is that my digs aren’t so glamorous. Or they’re only glamorous in a bohemian sort of way. I live in Beijing’s hutongs which are beautiful and full of character but are smelly.
Perhaps I don’t give the Chinese enough credit though, because I very quickly found a great Chinese flatmate through a friend. Actually his girlfriend rocked up to check the place out, a very cute stylish 25-year-old in high heeled boots and a big handbag. She took less than two minutes to look at the place and said I seemed nice, so could she take it? And said it would be her boyfriend moving in but that she’d be there a few days a week too. Oh and one other thing, hope it isn’t a problem that they tended to stay out very late on the weekends.
I told her it definitely wasn’t a problem because that was my habit too, to which she laughed and said, “really?”
It was a fine sign of things to come, frankly, because I really like both of them.
The guy turned out to be a 30-year-old computer programmer from Guangdong, with a hipstery haircut and a collection of cool, Timberland shoes from Taobao. His English name is Open, deigned to him by his English teacher because he always sat in class slack-jawed. Her nickname is 鱼 (Fish) and she used to work in events, but one day she came home and told me that she’d quit her job. Didn’t even give them notice, just stopped turning up to work.
Fish is chatty and vivacious, and perpetually surprising me. One day she came home sporting a tattoo of her beloved pet cat, it’s huge fluffy face wrapped around her tiny left arm. But one week later she came back and had an even bigger rose tattoo covered over it because she decided that she didn’t like the idea of the cat anyone once they started putting in the colours.
One unsurprising thing that the couple do is - as promised - go out late on the weekends. It is completely without exception that they will come back around dawn after partying on Fridays and Saturdays and sleep most of the following days. Last weekend, however, Fish was away for the weekend on a (appropriately enough) fishing trip with her family so I took Open out to a party with me. He was a bit nervous at the prospect of going to a “foreigner’s party”, but happily discovered there were a handful of Cantonese speakers present (Mainland Chinese and Overseas Chinese).
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have more entertaining tales of this awesome pair to come.
