China is nothing if not random, and it doesn't get much more random than Wonderland Amusement Park. A forty-five minute drive from downtown Beijing toward Badaling Great Wall, Wonderland was once slated to be the largest amusement park in Asia. That was before its maker, Thailand-based Reignwood Group, unable to...

"Man, what happened to Saturday night?" a friend wondered aloud one night in July, looking around a mostly empty bar in Vancouver's Gastown neighborhood. There were maybe two-dozen people there. No one mingled. One group was playing Jenga at their table.

My buddy hadn't lived in Vancouver very long, so...

The expatriate lifestyle in China can be divided equally between three pastimes, with the odd cheap foot massage thrown in:

1) Drinking.
2) Watching pirated DVDs
3) Navel gazing

There has been a great deal of expat navel gazing in the past few weeks, in...

Every time I visit the Great Wall of China, I'm reminded of a "Daily Show" bit from around the time of the Beijing Olympics. Correspondent Rob Riggle is broadcasting from the Wall to the New York studio, and Jon Stewart asks him how it is.

"It's a good wall... as...

"I saw him," a young woman said not long ago, sitting across from me at a busy Japanese restaurant in Beijing. "He was buying something in Sanlitun," she explained, referring to one of the city's major shopping and nightlife districts.

These were my clues: He was buying something... in...

In Australia, we bought an eggshell white 1984 Ford Falcon with fake wood paneling, blinkers that didn't work and a Playboy Bunny sticker on the back window. We paid $1600 -- divided by four -- to a German backpacker with a brush cut. He said it was worth twice that....

During my early days in Beijing, I would finish the late shift at China Daily and join the paper's foreign editors at a restaurant across the street known only as the Noodle Shop. It was a dingy place where the beer was cheap and the food suspect. The rumor was...

Not long after I moved to China in 2007, I experienced big time culture shock. I stepped onto a basketball court.

I was working at the China Daily, and word got out quick there was a tall guy at the newspaper. During one of my first shifts, the foreign...

By the time you read this the heat will be on in Beijing. Finally. But right now, as I write, it's cold -- cold in my local café, cold in my apartment, cold everywhere.

Citizens of Beijing wait until sometime in mid-November for the city to turn on central...

In China, mi gao is a popular type of rice cake. It's also my name. It translates to Tall Rice and Chinese people find it hilarious.

Tall Rice was born on a business card, a name given to me by my cubicle neighbor at China Daily, the...