I’m enjoying The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed by Michael Meyer, one of a few fun books I brought to China. (The others are Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt and The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu.) It’s about living in a downtown hutong. What pleases me most is how good his Chinese must be (I want reassurance I can learn it) but I also like strange stuff like this:
[Watching TV in a friend’s apartment, Spring Festival 2006.] The annual variety show paused from its singing and acrobatic performances to announce that China would send a pair of pandas to Taiwan as a measure of friendship. The program’s five hundred million viewers could pick the animals’ names by choosing from a list and sending a text message via cell phone.“Who says we can’t vote?” [his friend] laughed. . .
We ate and watched television until Unity and Wholeness were announced as winners of the name-the-panda election. (Taiwan’s government would initially refuse the animals.)
What were the other candidate names, I wonder.
i think the runners up were “invasion” and “formosa is ours!”