On my drive to work today, I was listening to NPR (as I do) and they had a surprisingly long piece on footbinding and China's last surviving footbound women.

Fascinating stuff (if old ladies talking about how easy it is to break your own bones as a child can be called that).

Footbinding... more

The latest Wired has some unpleasant things to say about Yahoo and the Chinese government.

And a fellow named Wang Xiaoning, who wrote a blog. Or, more likely, a Yahoogroup. It seems ironic (to me) that these are also the main way I've seen adoptive parents get to know each other during the process -- the long wait. Because some parents write about family stuff, these are often protected,... more

In case you were wondering what the people in charge are saying about the tighter restrictions, it's for the good of the kids!

Vice Minister of Civil Affairs Li Liguo said the rules were aimed at standardizing protection for orphans and were not expected to impact the number of adoptions.

"Adoption of orphaned children abroad and at home is going on normally," he said.

Very little more at that link, as well as over... more

Yikes. Totally Doing Star Business....

But domestic babies lack that dramatic edge!

Adopted foreign babies. Hot new accessory. Asian baby!

Laughs, yes. Uncomfortable, yes.

And just in time for Angelina Jolie's latest addition.

Here we are at xian (or hsien, in the old style), nearly up to halfway through the Book of Changes. Some scholars mark this as the beginning of the "Lower Canon" of the I Ching (pdf file). I'm not really sure what that means -- why there might be two canons in the book. Master Huang says the Lower Canon starts with a symbolic marriage (between xian and the next hexagram, heng) and has to do with... more

Here's an odd (and troubling) tale of a special needs child adopted by an American family -- despite being told by the Chinese officials that she was a "bad" baby.

It started when Alynn Baker noticed a child on one of those special needs adoption websites. I think it was one run by her agency, but I don't know. There are a few of them out there.

A cleft palate was a routine... more

The Northwest Alabama Times Daily is unafraid to opine about the One-Child Policy and the coming gender imbalance crisis.

Over time, demographers predict that China will face upward of 40 million males unable to find mates. This has led some Western academics to boldly predict the increased likelihood of Chinese military aggression as the government is forced to "burn off'' all those excess males through wars of conquest. If not, internal tumult must surely follow.

Here are four solid reasons why that feared scenario will not come to... more

Faithful readers will remember this story from a few weeks back, about the Starbucks coffee shop in the Forbidden City closing. Possibly.

The story was just on National Public Radio, with a long interview with Rui Chenggang, the Chinese journalist who started the crusade to kick the capitalists out of the imperial precincts. He's an interesting,... more

We're working on Daughter's habit of asking when we can send Son (son!) back to China. Children. Always saying the unsayable.

Until we can break their spirit, we're keeping them on display in a wrought iron cage, as you can see here.

Meanwhile, for those readers who're into stories of the miraculous, here's an unusual audio experience: Angels in Shandong. Ahem.

I really don't buy this guy's line, but, y'know, it's a pretty good story... more

What happens when you don't sell to developers in China.

No man is an island. But a man's home? That can be an island....