A short short story by Aaron Fox Lerner

I never understood why Derek disappeared until I got the business card. Before that it was a mystery. One day he was there, the next he wasn't. I didn't see him at the nice hutong bars he normally haunted, or at his favorite burger place in Sanlitun, or at the indie rock shows he used to attend regularly. He was nowhere.

After asking around, I discovered he wasn't the only person to have vanished. Everyone else shrugged the phenomenon off. It's Beijing. Going away parties are more common than birthdays. Foreigners leave all the time.

The anatomy of a door-to-door Taobao delivery – by Alec Ash

If you live in China and are anything like me, you order a lot from Taobao. The last dozen items I purchased from the online shopping site are: foam ear plugs, a wooden moxibustion set, USB speakers shaped like a panda head, a hemp cushion with a union jack design (vote no, Scots!), a laptop stand, a wireless keyboard and mouse, a piano stand clip-on light, a fridge magnet that you can snap open bottle caps against, a bottle of Bruichladdich whisky, a portable iPhone battery charger, and a tai chi sword. I have just revealed too much about myself.

If you have lived outside of China and are anything like me, you are in awe of Taobao. First, there's the old saw that Taobao has everything.

井底之蛙 jǐng dǐ zhī wā – Narrow-minded and ignorant

You've surely heard of this chengyu, so apologies for those who know it all already, Chinese Tuesdays is more for the 菜鸟 (cài niǎo, look it up if you're so smart). 井底之蛙 (jǐng dǐ zhī wā) literally means "frog at the bottom of a well" (之 is the same as 的), and is used for someone with a limited perspective, for example who thinks they know something but is actually ignorant, or who is talking about something they haven't seen. The idiom comes from a fable by Zhuangzi:

The frog lived down in a well where there was all he had to live. One day, a softshelled turtle came by and told him about the sea. 'The sea? Hah! It's paradise in here. Nothing can be better than this well. Why don't you come down and share my joy?'

Punch lines – flash fiction by Hannah Lincoln

It’s Wednesday night and still too early for the bar to fill with bodies, let alone cigarette smoke and laughter. This isn’t the type of crowd to smoke, anyway: Westerners in their twenties, mostly white, simply dressed, with patient faces waiting to be entertained by tonight’s comedy, sharp eyes ready to judge, and over-invested analyses already penning affected reviews. Myriad blog posts could flow from the fingertips of their sweating hands, damning you, tonight’s entertainment, to legendary mediocrity.

As the audience trickles in, your heart staggers under the weight of this possibility. Jenna, your best friend, sits alone near the back

A short story by Susie Gordon

THIS STORY FIRST APPEARED IN HALITERATURE

My name is Tom Winston, for all the good it does me. I remember when a name like mine used to mean something in Shanghai. Being Tom Winston opened doors. 

We journalists think we own the city, and in a way, we do. A part of it, at least. Don’t ask us why we’re here instead of working on a broadsheet back home. We’ll only wane lyrical that the jackboot of censorship is preferable to the sheepskin shoe-boot of some cashmere-clad Daddy’s girl who lisped her way into the editor’s chair of some gently right-wing rag.