futurejournalismproject:

Foxconn Employees Threaten Mass Suicide

Foxconn, the world’s largest electronic component maker (think: Apple, Amazon, Nintendo, Dell, Panasonic… well, you get the point) is not a nice place to work. So rampant have the suicides been that last year the company made workers sign pledges not to kill themselves.

Via The Atlantic Wire:

As American consumers ogle over shiny new gadgets at this week’s Consumer Electronic’s Show, the workers that make those products are threatening mass suicide for the horrid working conditions at Foxconn. 300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times.  It’s not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China. But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven’t lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things. 

As The Atlantic Wire points out, this week’s This American Life features a trip to a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China where approximately 350,000 to 450,000 people are employed.

You can listen to the episode here.

Image: Workers at Foxconn via China Southern Weekly

The New Face of Communism:

A common image, when you think of Chinese communism, is those 60′s retro posters with men and women looking strong under different Communist slogans. You know, things like “Study Mao everyday,” or…

A Walk in the Woods (with Ben):

There’s no getting around it: my campus is one of the most beautiful in China. The college is nestled in the foothills of Lin’an, and while we have a dirty, fast moving city to the south of the…

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

The One Christmas Tradition China gets Right:

So here we are, a week away from Christmas, and here in China things are not “beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” The weather is bitterly cold at night, no one has that festive feeling, and…

New in the Snack Aisle:

I’m used to seeing some strange flavored snacks, usually put out by some obscure Chinese snack company. But I was surprised to see this new flavor hit the school store. Cheese Lobster Flavor.

OMG! I Want to Punch Her and Be Her:

One perky little blond girl has been showing up on some of my favorite blogs lately. First at Study More Chinese and then on Lost Laowai. So who is she? Well, her name is Jessica Beinecke but…

My New Teaching Policy:

The Chinese school system is pretty strict when it comes to attendance. If a student needs to miss a class because they are sick, or have an appointment, or need to catch a bus, they…

Hitting up the Food Festival:

Me eating a waffle-like snack. They said it was a Hong Kong specialty and if that is true, I’m pretty psyched for our Hong Kong trip this winter because they were delicious.

Every…

The One Time I Leave my House Without a Camera….:

I got suckered into being a dancing monkey speaking english for 30-minutes to a group of 3rd graders at our library. before I left the house my hand hovered over my camera. Should I? I decided…

Pomelo – Totally Worth the Effort:

Every year at about this time we see these huge citrusy things showing up on the fruit stands. Some of them have wrappers with the word “grapefruit” on it, and I’ve never really been…

Great Wall of Links:

There have been some interesting articles about China lately. Here is a round up of a few of my favorites.

Awesome Commercial - We’ll start off with this hilarious Chinese commercial for 7up. It…

This Explains a Few Things:

You might have noticed I’ve been a little light on the blog posts lately. I typically average 3 posts a week, but for several weeks I’ve only managed a paltry 2. That’s because I’m busy. Crazy busy….

Humans can Never do Anything Simply:

On a recent dat trip to Wuzhen we went to the Yida Silk Workshop, a famous old-timey brand of silk that has been making silk tapestries, scarves and other things for over 100 years. In the…

The Two-Year Hump:

All the pictures in this post are of my current classmates. I brought my camera to class the other day and snapped away.

Before I came to China people told me there was a 6-month…

Chinglish!:

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a Chinglish entry, and I have a few good ones that I’ve been saving up:

This is technically not Chinglish as the English is perfectly correct, it’s…

Tea Sets:

As a tea drinker I have to say I am a fan of tea blends. You know, those crazy teas that mix like, 2 different kinds of mint, with chai and black tea and some sort of flower petal and maybe some…

I’m sure the above pictures have already been posted somewhere on the Chinese internet to embarrass me. My attempt to post them here first, to “own” the embarrassment, is probably too late. I will admit that yes I had been drinking a little, but while the first collage looks like the perfect poster for “7 Stages of Drunkenness” I think most of these were taken in a quick succession. So, I guess I go through a lot of emotions in one stage of drunkenness. It was sent to me by a student who I imagine spent time she should have been spending doing homework picking out the most ridiculous pictures of me and putting them together for the amusement of her peers. 

This was during an extremely fun evening in which Becky and I had dinner with the entirety of class 92 (juniors). Toasting is a very important part of Chinese culture and it seemed that none of the boys present wanted to let the culture down (although the girls didn’t seem as culturally sensitive). I’m adding some fun pictures of the students here too so I can share the embarrassment. 

I asked all the students in my writing classes to make their weekly assignment notebooks special in some way. I wanted them to make it an enjoyable book to write in and also be quickly identifiable so they will be easier to hand back. One of my favorites is Maureen’s. I will definitely never mistake it for anyone else’s. 

Westerners are Pussies:

A few months ago another foreign teacher asked for our help. He had a big cabinet that he wanted moved from the basement of our building to his 2nd-floor apartment in the building next door. It was…

I sprayed some of my owl stencils on really thin Chinese painting practice paper to see how they would paste to things. I found that I really liked them on smooth trees because they completely adhere to the surface in a way that looks natural. In fact from a distance it looks like someone carved the image into the tree. I think I might got for a new line of natural looking wheatpasted images on “wild” surfaces. 

Here’s a figure drawing I gave up on half way through because it was…uh…top heavy. But I kind of like the way the figure being only black on black works with the white sheet so I’ll share it.

Some recent scribbles drawn on my phone. 

My Commute:

My current mode of transportation.

I’ve lived and worked in a lot of places, all with different commutes. When I lived in New Hampshire and worked at a local stationary store, my…

I Thought it Would be Fun……:

My writing students keep a weekly “adventure journal.” Every week at the start of class I tell them a new adventure to go on some point during the week. Previous adventures have included…