The Dao De Jing is a writing that can be interpreted in many ways and each time you read it you may find that you see it in a different way. It’s an interesting concept to think that as soon as we assign a word to represent something, it already distorts true essence of that…
Money laundering is complicated, which is one of the reasons it thrives. Let’s look at fentanyl, Mexico, and China… There are many Chinese nationals who want to move money out of China. But there’s a $50,000 withdrawal limit per year and you can’t take more than $5000 with you on a plane when you’re leaving…
Daily Affirmations for Strength, Clarity, and Growth Most days when I get on the elliptical machine at the gym, I use a set of affirmations like this to help set my intentions and improve my language skills. 1. I am building a life of strength, clarity, and freedom. 我正在建立一个充满力量、清晰和自由的人生。 Estoy construyendo una vida de fuerza,…
Sichuan-Italian fusion. Bowtie pasta with assorted vegetables and sichuan peppercorns. If you have never had Szechuan peppercorns, it’s interesting because they make your mouth a little numb, but I also known to have some healing properties. Sichuan (or Szechuan) peppercorns are the dried husks of the prickly ash tree, commonly used in Chinese cuisine, particularly…
Well, the Chinese New Year just past, and it is now the year of the snake according to the Chinese Lunar Calendar. And this is a time when Chinese people exchange greetings and well wishes for the new year. Here are some common greetings that you might find useful to share with your Chinese friends:…
I’ve been getting some messages from my Chinese friends that everybody is switching from TikTok, over to a Little Red Book 小红书. I’ve used it before and this is something I thought about a long time ago when they first started talking about banning TikTok. They were already way ahead of us. What’s interesting about…
I first started hearing about intermittent fasting a year or two ago. I believe there were some people like Rich Roll, who were making some videos about the benefits. And then I encountered another discussion about this on GitHub, where they were publishing some articles in Chinese there and one of the topics was the…
So for a long time, I was taking lessons on Italki. During Covid I took a Chinese lesson every day and I remember at that time I was paying around six dollars or seven dollars per hour so it was very affordable every day. But recently, I have found the prices on Italki to be…
This was one of the slides at an event I attended last night. Everyone spoke Chinese, and the speaker gave a lecture for more than an hour about motivating yourself, and then he went on to talk about making money selling Life Insurance which I was not interested in, but great speaker! Here is the…
It’s been about 3 years since I became the organizer of the Irvine Chinese and English Meetup group. Not only do we have a Meetup.com group with about 1400 members but we also have a WeChat group with 250 members. You can see our picture from this week. It looks like we had about 22…