A Love Affair With China: Article about me in Global Times

John and I pose with a girl on our wedding day in China
Check out "A Love Affair With China," the article about me featured in the February 21, 2011 edition of the Global Times (P.S.: The little girl is NOT my daughter. 😉 )

If you happen to be flipping through the Monday, February 21 Shanghai edition of the Global Times, you might just find a familiar face on page 16. Me, actually. 😉

The Global Times profiled me and Speaking of China for their newspaper, in an article titled A Love Affair With China. I have a PDF version of the article and a link to the online version. Here’s a snippet of it:

As a Western woman with a shorter Chinese husband, she has turned a lot of heads, but Jocelyn Eikenburg is determined to question and challenge stereotypes about Chinese men and Western women in love.

The 33-year-old American keeps a blog called “Speaking of China,” where she shares her understanding of Chinese culture and offers advice to those in family and dating dilemmas. She was named one of the “101 Inspiring Women Bloggers to Watch for 2010” by WE Magazine, a women’s online publication based in Florida. Continue reading “A Love Affair With China: Article about me in Global Times”

Ask the Yangxifu: How to Learn Mandarin from Your Chinese Boyfriend or Girlfriend

Learning Mandarin Chinese from your Chinese boyfriend or girlfriend
How can you learn Mandarin Chinese from your Chinese boyfriend or girlfriend?

Language Lover asks:

How can I learn Mandarin from my Chinese boyfriend?

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That’s easy, of course — pillow talk. 😉

Yeah, right. If it were that easy, I wouldn’t have sounded like such a moron in Mandarin back in 1999, when I dated my first Chinese boyfriend.

He famously had this dream where we’d speak Chinese one day, English the next. But who were we kidding? He was an English major, comfortably fluent in my language, and I was drowning every time I strayed past “Ni Hao” and everything else in my Lonely Planet phrasebook. Even worse, I felt so embarrassed, awkward and inadequate every time I even attempted to say something in Chinese before him. So we didn’t even go there, and just built our relationship in English. Great for us, devastating for my Chinese. Continue reading “Ask the Yangxifu: How to Learn Mandarin from Your Chinese Boyfriend or Girlfriend”