Yup. Marital rape is still legal in China. I would not want to be married in China. Not that I think my husband would rape me, but because I don’t want it to be legal for him to do so.

Hey, so I don’t know if you intended to use He Zi’s first name throughout the piece, but her surname is He, not Zi. That’s how Chinese names are ordered. (As far as I know the surname ‘Zi’ does not exist in the limited repertoire of Chinese surnames, but I could be wrong).

Also her fiance’s name is Qin Kai (surname…

Well, something we can’t prove he did. It’s not clear that he didn’t do it, only that we don’t know if he did.

Did he do it? I dunno. Should he have gone to jail on the basis of that trial? No.

Except I’ve read the Bible (back when I was Christian, I’m not now), and Jesus doesn’t say anything about gender roles or who should do what in the home. Leave Christ out of your sexism.

Okay but the Property Brothers are hot. So.

The cost of real estate has skyrocketed in Taipei and a few other areas (Zhubei especially), otherwise, no, if you don’t go for fancy Western imported goods it’s about 1/3 to 2/3 as expensive as the USA. That said, pay is accordingly lower.

It is not a great place to go for a career, because working conditions in…

If you don’t realize how much worse it is in China, you don’t know much about China. The USA doesn’t have to be perfect or even great (it’s not) in order to point out that China is a cesspit of government oppression and censorship.

Seriously, it’s way worse. And that deserves to be called out. I live in a nation that…

Not as much as we would like, no. I won’t pretend it’s perfect in the US. But...wow man. China is a LOT worse. A LOT WORSE.

(I live in Taiwan, although it’s a different country we face an existential threat from our enemies across the strait. So, I have a front row seat to the shitshow that is China’s government…

BTW, I teach English here at the professional level (some corporate training, some examining, no cram schools). I have permanent residency so I can basically do what I like, but I don’t want to change careers.

I don’t know exactly what brought me. I had spent a year in China and knew I wanted to continue learning…

The 2014 movements were a convergence of several factors:

1.) an increasing feeling that the KMT and the Ma administration were getting too close to China for comfort, trusting a regime that ought not to be trusted and does NOT care about Taiwan’s best interests - the opposite actually - with the Ma administration…

Utility bills are not higher than the US - if anything they are far lower, lower than they should be (government officials have lots of friends in the state run utilities companies though I have to say the state does a pretty good job - all this American fearmongering about governments doing a worse job than private…

Things are really changing! Kaohsiung now has a real Western food scene, and Tainan is where all the cool kids are moving because of the better weather, slower pace of life, cheaper rents and local culture that is a bit more friendly to bohemian types. So a lot of aspiring cafe owners, artists and ‘digital nomad’…

And censorship! Movies the Chinese government approves of! Yay! Wooooooo

Nah, I don’t respect the Chinese (government) and I still think it’s weird to have a movie where Matt Damon fights monsters on the Great Wall.

But seriously though fuck the Chinese government.

I won’t go see it because every movie made in China, distributed in China and promoted by the Chinese film industry must be approved by Chinese government censors, and they can eat me.

I kind of hope the monsters win.

I live in Taiwan, the Chinese government can eat a dick and then get eaten by fucking monsters.

A useless language?? 講三小！！

It is not widely spoken in the world but it carries the weight of an entire nation’s history. There is a reason the KMT tried to stamp it (and Hakka, and the aboriginal languages) out - because their brand of “you are all Chinese and you must accept that you are Chinese and an inalienable…

We are working to fix things (I’m a member of this group but not really as involved as I should be):

Yeah no, students ask questions that require advanced knowledge all the time, and I suppose sometimes you can put them off with “that’s really not something you need to worry about right now” but after a not-terribly-long time they will start to rightly suspect your incompetence and lose respect for you

As an English teacher (a professional one - I have a degree in it, not a backpacker though it’s funny and speaks ill of my field that I have to clarify that) I would say yes...but. You need BOTH a detailed knowledge of the subject matter *and* know how to teach it. You really need both. If anything it’s harder to do…