If you're pregnant in China, you'll be surprised the most common question you get is, "Is it a boy or a girl?"
When I ventured to Chaoyang Park to get that tan, I was a little surprised to find it empty of sunbathers.
Fortunately for many worried parents like mine, who wanted a really quick fix for their children, there was a panacea called the liang cha or a kind of Chinese herbal tea.
"Try this on," Daissy Owen says, tossing another T-shirt over the WalMart changing room door.
News about the recent earthquakes in Yunnan province and Japan brought back memories of my last trip to Wenchuan, Sichuan province, in February.
A foreigner hoping to learn Chinese is like a person with a flabby physique hoping to get in shape.
They say the eyes are the window of the soul. In that case, eyebrows must be window frames. There's nothing quite like well-shaped eyebrows to set off a girl's peepers.
When I was living in Adelaide, I would often buy packets of dried "Long Life Noodles" from a little shop in Chinatown, near the Central Market.
If there's one thing I love about Beijing's traffic it is the propensity of drivers to blow their horns at the slightest provocation.
The Chinese people are a friendly mob and are quick to assist baffled newcomers in this foreign land on the far side of the world.
I have never been colder than here in Beijing. A perishing cold that creeps across your back and chills your arms and legs.
When people talk about Yao Ming now, their thoughts are of his latest injury and the uncertainty this has brought upon his career.