Fili’s world

• Part 1 : The Importers, The Internet Auctioneer, The English Teacher
• Part 2 : The Hosteler, The Blogger.
• Part 3 : The Online Gamer, The Travel Journalist
• Part 4 : Write Chinese names, Chinese related blogging.
• Part 5 : Build websites

Write Chinese names

You’re a Chinese student at a far away expensive land like the UK and you’re completely broke. You sill don’t know English that well, you’re still working on your degree and you’ve had enough of serving people in fast-food chains and cleaning dishes in restaurants. All you have to work with is your native abilities for Chinese, what can you do to earn fast-money?

In the latest fashion in the west for all things Chinese one doesn’t have to look far since opportunities are everywhere. Just as English speaking persons go and teach English in Asian countries, a Chinese native-speaker can look for similiar ventures in the western countries, maybe focusing on giving private lessons. Just as an English teacher in Taiwan doesn’t have to know Chinese in order to be a good teacher, a Chinese teacher doesn’t really have to know how to talk in English and basic skills are enough. But that’s too plain and obvious, any other ideas?

Imagine that you’re walking downtown Beijing and you see a huge crowd of Chinese people hoovering over a tiny stall. You feel curious, push your way around into the mass of people only to discover that all the Chinese people are watching a white-person working on writing some thing in English. A Chinese person would give the westerner his Chinese name, the westerner would look it up in his small book and then go on to draw the Chinese’s English initials on a small piece of paper, and then the whole crowd would go "OOOooo! beautiful! don’t you think English letter are just gorgeous?". Nahh, no chance of that happening, right?

But us, westerners, we’re quite different and in the UK there’s a good chance that if you can translate English names to Chinese and write them in plain calligraphy on a piece of paper that you’ll be able to make extremely good money. I’ve seen very busy Chinese names stalls in both Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival and the market in Covent Gardens, giving you your Chinese name to hang on the wall for as little as 3-5pounds.

Here’s what it looks like :

Chinese related blogging

It occured to me for the first time this past few days, as my site was getting more hits over the "China : Sex, Pride and a bit about Israel " post than I usually get in 3 months, that China related news is something many people are interested in, especially regarding juicy topics. EastSouthWestNorth is obviously a very popular site and there are other popular example such as the Peking Duck (looking at his sitemeter stats), and some Taiwanese-oriented examples like "The View from Taiwan ". There’s power in being able to follow Chinese blogs and newspapers and to write about them to the interested westerners. I’ll probably go back to my anonymity pretty soon but now that I know how much traffic those sites are getting I think that a person who knows basic-Chinese can offer a great service for the people outside China interested in Chinese culture and if one really wants to - maybe do it as a full-time blogger with some small ads (use Firefox with Adblock if that really bothers you). The more sites like that the better, I say, it surely makes my online time more enjoyable.