Back in Business!

I am pleased to announce that Ask the Chinese Guy is back in business! Though it won't be a Chinese Guy. A new colleague of mine has volunteered to take your questions. She is a Chinese American who has been to China and lived there for months at a time. She has generously offered to take the place of TCG.

She will be attributed by the pseudonym: Yang

Though she will be answering the majority of the questions, I will still do 100% of the posting, as a convenience to her.

So lets get things going again! Send your questions here!

Take note that this is a new email address, if you sent a question to the old TCG email and never received a response, please do not hesitate to resend it to this new address.

Comment Spam

Yeah, Im still here. I do like to check in periodically to do some housekeeping. Maybe I'll add a post again if I can think of one.

Comment spam has been a big problem Im noticing. There was so much of it that I just deleted all recent comments posted anonymously. If you posted a real comment as anon and it got deleted, I apologize.

Most spam comments start out looking legitimate saying something like "great post" or "wonderful blog" etc, then at the end it says something like "visit my webpage -> 'webpage'" and links to a site for penis enlargement pills or something. It's annoying, and filtering out spam by hand or doing moderation is much too time consuming. So an ID is now required to comment (Google, Open ID etc). In addition, CAPTCHA is now enabled. This should prevent flooding.

And FYI, I have no plan to delete this blog, but no real plan to revive it either (unless someone wants to take over).

Two can play at this Game

Colors in Chinese Culture II

A long time ago I made a post about colors in Chinese culture, well now you can find it in info graph form! Enjoy.

Taiwanese awarded visa free travel to the US

Good news for Taiwanese passport holders, they can now visit the US without a visa! On November 1st, Taiwan gained entrance to the United States visa waiver program, a select group of 38 countries that can visit the US without the need for a visa. The other countries are:

-Andorra -Australia -Austria -Belgium -Brunei -Canada -Czech Republic -Denmark -Estonia

-Finland -France -Germany -Greece -Hungary -Iceland -Ireland -Italy -Japan -Latvia -Liechtenstein

-Lithuania -Luxembourg -Malta -Monaco -Netherlands -New Zealand -Norway -Portugal -San Marino

-Singapore -Slovakia -Slovenia -South Korea -Spain -Switzerland -Sweden -United Kingdom and now Taiwan!

Taiwanese are beginning to enjoy more and visa free travel. Just last year, the EU gave them visa free access to the Schengen Area.

This news however, is making Hong Kongers a little upset. Despite years of lobbying and already having extensive visa free travel privileges, Hong Kong passport holders are still being left out of the visa waiver program.

This is in contrast to their mainlander counterparts who can't really go anywhere without visas.

So if you're Taiwanese, now is the perfect time to see the USA! I hope you enjoy your stay.