Editor's note:

How is life in Beijing for foreigners? A group of foreign friends, including students, artists, writers, share their stories and dreams with cityofbeijing website readers.

Enjoy our special and you are welcome to share your Beijing stories with us.

Uncle Hanzi is quite a character

He was just an academic with an unusual hobby - until his etymology website of Chinese characters became a smash hit online

Before 2011, Richard Sears was little known in China.

His Sears' etymology website of Chinese characters, which traces the origin and evolution of 6,552 of the most-common modern Chinese characters, had a small following. The academic was living quietly in the United States.

Do-it-yourself air

When Beijing was hit with horrific bad smog in early 2013, one group of friends saw past the fog to a bright spark of opportunity - creating and selling homemade air filter kits. Eric Jou has the story.

In early 2013, northern China was hit with a particularly bad spell of poor air quality. This period in Beijing became known around the world as the "airpocalypse", and the nation's capital was compared to the futuristic dystopia depicted in movies such as Blade Runner. However, for one team of young Americans and Chinese, the air crisis was the inspiration for a brilliant project.

Dirt and glory capture Beijing living

A film about sanlitun showcases the lives of the expat community in the chinese capital

Expat troubles are a new topic among directors in Chinese and European independent cinema. From the follies of Chinese living abroad and Americans living in China, there is a wealth of ridiculousness to be parodied, from linguistic high jinks through to any number of cultural faux pas.

French diarist pens Beijing book

French writer Vincent Hein's diary of life in Beijing has been published in Chinese. He chats to Sun Ye about why he loves living in the capital.

Guess the location:

It's freakishly cold in winter. It's an acoustic war zone when the year's biggest holiday hits and its residents walk around in pajamas and recommend drinking hot water for every ailment.

 

A response to place

From knitting to painting, Irish artist weaves her heritage and surroundings into her art, as Tracie Barrett discovers.

The first thing one notices on entering the Beijing apartment of artist Niamh Cunningham is the number of canvases covering almost every inch of wall space. A closer look shows an equally impressive variety of styles and subject matter - the dark reds and black silhouettes of her subway series, thickly applied impasto oils that form rugged crags on a huge mountainscape, and the soft, seemingly melting lines of her Transparent Milk portraits, inspired by the work of the contemporary Chinese artist Zheng Delong.

Love and bagels in Beijing

Ex-pat entrepreneur Julian Travlin had the tasty idea of making top-quality bagels, but in the process the American cooked up an unexpected love affair.

This is Julian's story.

Blue baker's apron; big, black-framed glasses; flour in his hair - in fact, flour pretty much everywhere - and a smile as big as Vermont, the US state where he grew up: this is the image of Julian Tavalin that recently appeared on a Beijing magazine cover.

The photo might give the sense that Tavalin is a passionate foodie, reveling in the moment as he pounds wholesome whole wheat dough toward its destiny as fresh-baked bagels.

"Are you kidding?" he says. "I'd been looking for a good bagel in Beijing - for me to eat!"

Tavalin Bagels was the answer to that need. It has now been going long enough to have momentum, but in the early days, bagels consumed him, rather than the other way around.

"Conceptualizing the work and doing it is completely different," he says. "You don't sleep. You don't do much else.

"I remember when we opened - sitting there, every day, looking across the street at the cigarette store and the DVD shop. I was bored out of my mind. Nobody came in. Nobody knew we were even there!" he says, laughing.

Then one day, an attractive young woman he'd seen before smoking outside the shop came into the street and turned not into the cigarette store but into the bagel shop.

"Do you have butter?" she asked.

"She had no idea what a bagel was," he says. "But I told her the butter was free."

He assured her that he wasn't giving her a pick-up line, that butter was free with a bagel for everyone.

Tavalin is still bright-eyed with excitement as he describes that encounter with "the mystery woman".

"She said 'thank you' and took her bagel and her butter and went away."

But she came back. It turned out she lived almost right above the shop.

"I was kind of new to Beijing and a little bit lonely at that time," says Anna Nasuta of Belarus. "I didn't have a lot of friends, so we talked a little bit. It started like that."

Earlier this spring, the two got married.

"If all else fails with the bagel company," Tavelin says, "I got what I wanted out of it!"

Tavelin came to China almost by accident.

"I'd never been anywhere, and I was living in a small town where nothing ever happens," he says.

There was, however, a course on modern Chinese history, starting from 1911 and taught by a professor who had been to China in the 1980s. Tavalin was "immediately" hooked on the energy he could feel in the classroom.

"But the time I made my first trip to China in 2005 - a six-week language-credit program that would let me graduate early - I already knew I was ultimately going to live here," he says.

The bagels happened late one night, when Tavalin and a couple of friends in Beijing were surfing the Internet, eager to find "the thing" - the business opportunity most expats are sure they will find in China.

"We saw it was a niche that wasn't being served, and I know a good bagel when I see one," he says. "We tried a lot of recipes to get the bagels just right. And we use quality ingredients, which makes them a little expensive. But it makes all the difference."

Now the bagel business has settled into a routine - "everything that can go wrong has gone wrong enough times that our Chinese staff can handle routine problems" - he's working on a new project: an Internet TV show like those on YouTube.

"I've written the first season's scripts, built the sets, developed the characters, made the costumes, all that," he says, adding that he expects to start production in about six months.

"You know Beijing," he says with a grin. "As much as it can be crazy, it's just ripe with opportunities."

Fritz P.Labinghisa and his wife Joy Lim have been in China for almost ten years.

He considers himself a Beijinger and she's a dancing queen, together the Philippine couple teaches Latin dance to an integrated group of young Chinese and foreigners.

Local flavors, local friends

Whenever I'm in a new city, I like to walk as much as I can, particularly off the beaten track—first to get my bearings, then to stumble on unexpected treasures that aren't part of the regular tourist trails. But most importantly I want to see how the people live, and maybe even have a chat.

I recall the first time I visited Shanghai, exactly 30 years ago. It was a very different place than modern Shanghai. I managed to get completely lost on one of my peregrinations, but an old woman, recognizing my dilemma, motioned for me to follow her, and sure enough, after about 15 minutes, I Xwas back on a road I could recognize, one leading directly to my hotel. I thanked her as best as I could, and she smiled, satisfied that she had helped a foreigner. 

I didn't visit Beijing on that occasion. In fact, I didn't hit the capital until 20 years later, and China had certainly changed. [Full Story]

Not quite a royal flush

We entered the courtyard, with its tiny garden area and quaint decorations, and we instantly fell in love with the place.

My wife and I hadn't been searching long for a new home before we arranged to view a promising apartment in a siheyuan - a traditional hutong residence - in central Beijing. It fits all our requirements - within budget, nice size, nice location and no agent fees.

Initially, we couldn't believe our luck. It had been vacant for a few weeks after being refurbished, the friendly landlord told us. What a find, I thought. Why hadn't this place been snapped up already? [Full Story]

A hop, skip and a jump to nowhere

An old proverb says: "Pride goeth before a fall." However, I never really knew what it meant until my trip to the museum.

It was on an overcast day in November, a few weeks after my arrival in China, and I wanted to see the Andy Warhol exhibit before it closed at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. But even after my colleagues told me it was hard to find, I was stubbornly set on getting there on my own - no cabs or address written out in Chinese characters for me. No, I would travel like the typical Beijinger I hoped to become, using only public transportation. [Full Story]

Running through the haze becomes first Chinese lesson

As a former champion runner back in the United Kingdom a few years ago - OK, many years ago - I learned the importance of timing. I didn't have to be a Usain Bolt wannabe to realize that you can lose a middle-distance race by one hundredth of a second, just as easily as a sprinter can in 100 meters.My friends and acquaintances would race to say that it's a shame that my recognition of the tyranny of the stopwatch did not stretch to a respect for the clock, since I was frequently late for meetings. My excuse remains that winning or losing by a hairsbreadth meant that I needed a bit more latitude off the track.

Of course, they are different examples of timing; and here's another one that's afflicting me at the moment. Having retired from a job which took me to the four corners of the Earth over the past 30 years, I arrived in Beijing recently, with a view to finding an apartment for a few months, in order to start learning Chinese. And since I still run most days, albeit more slowly than those "few years ago", my stipulations for flat-hunting were that it had to be near a park and a subway. Now, unlike in my home in London, that cuts down the options considerably. [Full Story]

Discovering Beijing through bicycling 

Shortly after I arrived in Beijing last year, a friend in South Korea asked me if I had yet bought a bicycle. As an avid motorcyclist for many years, who has ridden throughout New Zealand, Australia, the United States, South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia, I laughed at the thought of riding a bicycle. A self-affirmed adrenaline junkie, I wasn't yet ready to slow down to cycling speed.

Then, as chance would have it, a colleague went home for an extended time, leaving his bicycle behind and telling me I was welcome to use it. The Korean friend now has the last laugh, as he listens to me extol the virtues of bicycling in Beijing and exploring the city in ways not possible using other means of transportation.

My first ride here was in the early evening, the dusk light that is known to experienced motorcyclists as one of the most dangerous times to be riding. The soft half-light obscures smaller vehicles and provides an even stronger invisibility cloak to motorcycles and bicycles than they already have. But, like most things in China, such inconveniences don't slow the locals any. I found myself surrounded by other cyclists, weaving in and out of traffic, dodging cars, trucks, three-wheeled carts, motorized rickshaws and oblivious pedestrians, and marveling at how well it actually worked. [Full Story]

 Kim Lee's Column

Kim Lee is a writer and teacher specializing in family education.   She lives in Beijing with her three daughters.

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