A poem by Tom Fearon

I walked up to the east gate
of CCTV in the summer of ’09,
when a soldier stretched his arm out
his white-gloved hand nearly touching mine.
‘Wow, he’s friendly,’ I thought, shaking his hand,
but he pulled it back and made a scowl,
“Please show your ID, young foreign man!”

I sat before my computer
its screen beckoned with a script,
a half-baked lede and awful stand up
in rich Chinglish did it drip.

Earlier this year, Hong Kong cartoonist Ah Toh (阿塗) published a Cantonese comic through the independent magazine Passion Times that became an instant viral hit. Based on Netherlandish Proverbs, a sixteenth century Flemish painting, Ah Toh’s version includes illustrations of 81 Cantonese idioms. See the full image with English explanations for all the proverbs here.

The cartoon shows just how colourful Hong Kong and southern Chinese idioms are. These include four-character idioms (成语 chengyu) such as “for the elephant to fly across the river” (飛象過河 fei jeuhng gwo hoh – to do something unexpected or break the rules), and everyday slang like to stir-fry squid (炒魷魚 chaau yau yu) for to get fired.

Up in the air – flash fiction by Nick Compton

Been saddled up on this airplane economy seat for too long. I know it doubles as a floatation device, but I have a strong breast stroke and don’t plan on surviving a spiraling free fall from 30,000 feet into the deep Pacific, anyway.

United, from New Orleans to Denver to San Francisco to Beijing. Over 20 hours of mind-numbing, time-bending flight.

You start out early in the morning. Pull yourself out of a warm bed next to a soft girlfriend to load luggage, slurp coffee and pace off reams of reserve energy that would otherwise remain bound up in the maddeningly close confines of a trans-pacific budget flight.

A Q&A with Chinese sci fi author Fei Dao – by Alec Ash

Up on the LRB blog is my new piece about science fiction in China. Whereas more realist Chinese literature is often toothless to convey the realities about China, I argue sci fi can fill the breach – because of less stringent censorship for a more roundabout form, but also because some of those realities in a country that has squeezed so much change into just a few decades can frankly seem a little sci fi.

I've dusted off an old Q&A I did with Fei Dao, a young Chinese science fiction writer, last year, orginally for the LARB China blog. Plus at the bottom I've included a small truckload of further reading, including stories in translation, if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole.

Cantonese can be a creative tool for foul language and political insults. A few years ago, the phrase “Delay no more” started appearing on t-shirts and billboards for a popular clothing brand, hinting at the similar-sounding Cantonese diu lei lo mo, which means “f**k your old mother”. Soon after, grassroots organisations added the profanity to their own cause by printing their own t-shirts: “Universal Suffrage, Delay No More” and “Delay No More, Stop Reclamation of the Habour.”

Earlier this year, a stuffed wolf toy from IKEA called Lufsig also became a crude symbol of anti-government protest – the nickname of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive CY Leung by his critics is “the wolf”.