I’m slowly digging myself out of the mire of crap I’ve had to put on hold for the last three or four weeks. I succeeded in a little test of not touching the Internet for the 10 days I was in Thailand. As someone that gets itchy when he hasn’t checked his e-mail in a couple hours… I’m a bit proud I managed it.
However, now I’m paying for it with a bit of a backlog of e-mails to reply to, posts to write, photos to process, site bugs to fix and a boatload of blog entries to read in my RSS reader. I’m quick to stop Bloglines from loading when I open my browser for the simple reason that I don’t want to get sucked in to the day’s worth of reading awaiting me there.
That said, I couldn’t resist checking out Danwei and that led me to discover Ich Bin Ein Beijinger – a great, recently-revived, blog by writer and former Tang Dynasty rocker, “Kaiser Kuo”.
This, in turn, reminded me that I’ve been meaning to make mention of a recent Danwei TV episode – “Beijing blogger Wang Xiaofeng sticks it to the man“. I had heard of Wang Xiaofeng referenced a number of times via his pen name, Massage Milk, in various translated posts on ESWN and Danwei and always thought he had some interesting things to say, but this video removed all doubt I previously held that there were no truly cool Chinese. Kudos to Jeremy for being an excellent mic stand and just letting Wang talk.
The one thing that all the time off the net did allow for was finally completing a novel I’ve been trying to finish for a month or two.
War Trash is the fictional memoir of a young Nationalists-trained soldier, Yu Yuan, who is ordered away from his ailing mother and young fiancee in Sichuan to the cold and confusing front-lines of the Korean War. Along with giving a bit of a Korean War history lesson, the novel delves deepest into the lines drawn between Communists and Nationalists in the years following the Chinese civil war.
Check out the full review of War Trash at the Lost Laowai blog.
I’m off to sort through my honeymoon photos.
