more stories

Warrior for extreme cuisine

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-11-18

MICHAEL Ohlsson tastes food like scorpion and spiders so you don't have to - instead you can read all about it on his blog, writes Sam Riley. Whether it's crunching on a tarantula in Cambodia, snacking on a...

---

City's top Kiwi traces China roots back to 1925

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-11-11

IN 1925 the great-grandparents of New Zealand's consul general in Shanghai set up a teaching hospital in Hebei Province, and today the top Kiwi in this city is still connecting Chinese and New Zealanders. Nancy Zhang...

---

A fresh rap for hip-hop

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-10-28

AMERICAN-BORN Tim Wu has brushed up on Chinese and is about to launch a very different hip-hop album speaking to young Chinese in the language of their streets. Sam Riley raps. Most foreigners learning Chinese...

---

Playing a horn of plenty

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-10-21

HORN player JQ Whitcomb is cofounder of the JZ Jazz School, the band 5below, and the music director for a fast-growing independent radio station Soulfire. The American talks to Nancy Zhang about the music scene and...

---

Multi-faceted diamond man

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-10-14

DEREK Palmer markets diamond baubles to rich young Chinese - and in his other life he helps Bangladeshi orphans and destitute women. Xu Wei reports. For most of his life, Derek Palmer has been accustomed to a culture...

---

Green MaGIC casts design spell

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-10-14

CHINA'S best young designing minds are competing in MaGIC to invent the best in the latest generation of green products. The innovative competition, Made Green in China, aims to embed green design principles into...

---

Matching interns and jobs

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-9-30

FINDING an unmet need and filling it - that's how one Dutch couple started a company. They match overseas intern wannabes with companies that need an expat pair of hands. Jantine Vos reports. China is an increasingly...

---

Two Frenchmen call the tune in 'Chinatoon'

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-9-23

TOM and Alex are a pair of hapless French expats in Shanghai. Every month they get into scrapes and funny adventures due to cultural and language misunderstandings around town. But unlike most expat lives, their...

---

Magical shock and awe

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-9-16

FACED with a tragedy that threatened to destroy his life, Australian Vasilios Elovalis found an unlikely calling that has taken him around the world where he spreads a little magic in the lives of everyone he meets....

---

Hark! Hark! The Shark

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-9-9

NOT everyone can get in touch with their warm cuddly side when living in Shanghai, but Dutch environmental education campaigner Julie Adams is helping to save the environment with the help of her cuddly alter-ego Sammy...

---

'Kind of crazy' French singer pursues China fame

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-9-2

CHRISTOPHE Hisquin got the "China bug" at school in Lyon and, after toying with being a professional tennis player, he came to Shanghai for language study and is now carving out a musical career, Nancy Zhang reports....

---

Driving sideways the route to a fulfilling career

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-8-26

IT was a picnic lunch more than two years ago that provided the unlikely inspiration for Frenchman Thomas Chabrieres to ditch the suit and follow his dreams. The former marketing executive last year started Shanghai...

---

Man on a bicycle becomes a star of Chinese TV

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-8-19

THERE are two types of expats in China: those with drivers and those with bicycles," says Steven Weathers, an actor, director and adventurer from the US who has lived in Shanghai for three years. "And I have a...

---

China, take your partners!

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-8-12

A dance engagement in Hong Kong sparked Jorge Geronimo's interest in all things Chinese and sowed the seeds of a dream that's now reality, Fei Lai reports.With his brown eyes, tanned skin, slender stature and shaved...

---

The man for all seasons

Feature | Expat Tales
2009-8-5

ACADEMIC and 18th-century theater buff, documentary maker and TV producer, spin doctor and marketer, business leader and even moose unveiler, Canadian Mark Ceolin is no stranger to taking on different roles during...