China

Tomb Sweeping day in China

Two PocketCultures readers from China wrote in with this post about tomb sweeping day in China, which was on April 4th this year.

Tomb-sweeping Day has a very long history in China. It is an important day which shows that we Chinese value family ties and our ancestors. For the older generation, the most common practice is to return to their birthplace and to visit the cemetery of their ancestors. In the countryside, many tombs look like small piles of earth.

Tombs decorated at a cemetery in Beijing

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Author Tash Aw on moving to China and the South Asian novel

Recently I had the privelege of interviewing Malaysian author Tash Aw for the review site Bookmunch.

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Stephen, from London to Beijing

Stephen is from Britain met his American educated Chinese partner in Venezuela. After a long-distance relationship, they now live in Beijing.

Stephen and riends having tea in Kashgar

Where are you from?

I’m originally from the south coast of England, but moved to London for university and stayed for work.

Hailan (Helen) is from Beijing, but attended school and university in Texas, and then went to work in New York.

Where and how did you meet?

I’d just taken voluntary redundancy from a city job in 2009 so set off to volunteer in Central America. I lived in Costa Rica for a couple of months, building houses with Habitat for Humanity. This was enough time to learn a bit of Spanish, so I travelled south to Colombia to start a circuit of Latin America.

I met Helen in Venezuela on Christmas Eve. We travelled together for a while, then went our separate ways (her to Antarctica, me to Easter Island) then met up again in Argentina.

She was just being posted back to China, so I followed along.

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Picture Postcards: A fridge in China

Photo taken by lhepler on Flickr.

Infographic: Top languages on the Internet

As the number of web users grows around the world, languages on the internet have continued to expand resulting in an increasingly multilingual internet. The Internet used to be English centric and even today; English remains the dominant language, but the remarkable growth of languages such as Chinese has changed the online language landscape.

Continuing on from a previous post on the Top 10 languages on the internet, which listed the growth of various languages on the web, I thought of revisiting the topic and look at the changes that have occurred since then through an infographic.

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A mission to understand the youth of the world

Adrian Fisk is the photographer behind the photos of young people from China and India we’ve featured over the last two weeks on People of the World. The concept is simple but effective: photograph young people with their thoughts about the future to compile a snapshot of the preoccupations of a generation, with the objective of increasing understanding between – and within – societies. So far iSpeak has covered China and India, and now Adrian is working on plans to take it to 25 different countries. I caught up with Adrian via Skype to find out more.

Western media project a certain image of China, but is it an accurate one? Pondering this question, Adrian realised how little he (and many others he knows) understood about China’s young people; their worries, hopes and dreams. Formerly a photojournalist, he had been living in India for the last seven years, and seen for himself the rise of South-East Asia, and in particular India and China. Together these countries have 1.2bn young people (aged 16 to 30): this generation is going to have a huge influence on the world, and so to understand where the world is going we need to understand how they see the world.

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