Narrate China aims to vividly share stories of real life experiences in China and make intimate perspectives accessible online.
Presenting: Narrate China
Tag: China stories
Dating in China [part 2]
I tried to tell my parents about how great my boyfriend was. My mom said, “no, but he is not Chinese.”
Helen Wang on Growing up during the Cultural Revolution (interview: part 1)
I remember my mother sewed a lot of pockets into my coat. I’d put on the coat with a lot of inside-out pockets and go to the fields and take some food in the pockets and run back quickly so that they had food.
The value of pronouns; or, ‘Excuse me, Sir?’
How are we to believe Mao Zedong's statement that "women hold up half the sky", if China’s women are being downtrodden by the very language they speak?
Where did my hair go? The aftermath of a drastic hair cut
Four months ago, I made the courageous decision to cut my 12 inch hair off entirely. Here's a video of the day, the event, and the aftermath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZpAY8zrkEg A huge thank you to my good friends Maxi Battaglia and Ponita Reasmy for making this video possible. It is a wonderful record of a major moment in [...]
Looking back: 2015 in review
This has been a whirlwind of a year. In the past 12 months, I've truly settled into a happy, fulfilling life in China. I've got a lot to be proud of, much of it a result of hard work, some of it springing from luck. But it didn't all go smoothly. I began the year [...]
My fear of failure and how I use it as a motivational tool
Lying side by side in the darkness one evening, at that time of night when we know we should be sleeping but have our most honest conversations, he asked me something he had yet to learn about me: “What are you most afraid of? Is it Spiders? Snakes?” No, I’m not scared of spiders or [...]
方便: China’s obsession with convenience
Convenience is a myth for the majority of Chinese people. A myth lived out only by the elite, those rich enough to consider time more important than money. For everyone else, it is a long perpetuated lie cast by the shadow of capitalism hanging over the lives of 1.4 billion people. A lie many no longer believe will ever come true.
A sweet, sour, bitter, spicy life
In Chinese, there is an expression: 酸甜苦辣 Pronounced: Suan, Tian, Ku, La It literally means as Sour, Sweet, Bitter, Spicy and translates as the joys and sorrows of life. I love this phrase. It is true to life anywhere in the world. But it seems to lend itself particularly well to life in China. As my Chinese tutor explained to [...]
Chinese Dentist Time
What time is it? It's Chinese Dentist Time! When I was a kid, just as ten to ten became Cowboy Time (ten to ten to ten ten ten..., two thirty became tooth hurty - Chinese Dentist Time. It was years before I realised the racism of this joke. But it has nonetheless been circling my head for the [...]
Zhēn de Gender 