In Friday's China Daily I found the following article:
"Billionaire seeks surgery for Andy Lau looks

A Shanghai billionaire recently sought out a cosmetic surgeon in Hangzhou for a makeover as Hong Kong pop star Andy Lau, before proposing to the woman under the media spotlight for her obsessive love for Lau.

Li Xingda, 40, is a property developer who owns a dozen companies. Recently, he read stories about the controversial woman Yang Lijuan of Gansu Province who has been chasing after Lau for 13 years and even lost her father to her obsession. He reportedly took his life, leaving behind a note that he hoped that by doing so, Lau would finally pay some attention to his daughter. Her loyalty prompted Li to consider the makeover before making her a marriage proposal. The Hangzhou hospital has told him the surgery will be complicated and cost him at least 3 million yuan ($384,615).

(Huashang Daily) "

Before I asked myself who is crazier: Yang Lijuan or her father? But this guy is really unbelievable! Why waste so much money on a surgery to marry a crazy stalker? And just the looks don't turn you into Andy Lau...

Recently one case of a crazy stalker fan is making big waves in China. It's about Andy Lau (aka Liu Dehua), a Hong Kong singer and movie star, that I also really like and his fan Yang Lijuan, a 28 year old woman, that is obsessed by Lau for already 13 years. Her family spend up all their money to follow Lau and Yang also always tried to get close to Lau and talk to him. Last week she went with her parents to Hong Kong and even managed to attend a party with Lau and had a picture taken together with him. But she wanted to spend more time with Lau. The next day Yang's father committed suicide by drowning, leaving a 12 pages letter, in which he expressed his wish for his daughter to get a chance to have a private meting with Lau. The question is: Who is crazier? Yang Lijuan or her father? (he also wanted to sell one of his kidneys to raise money for her trips to Lau and he did sell their house fo this purpose)

This story ist just ridiculous and I agree with Lau's agency, in not giving Yang the opportunity to meet Lau privately. That would just support this stalker behaviour. Right now there is a discussion going on, who is responsible for this tragedy. Is it just the family's fault and problem, or has the media also to take over responsibility, because they have encouraged Yang Lijuan in her attempts to meet Lau.

You can read the full story here: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-03/29/content_839741.htm

When I read about this case in Chinese, I came across about to words, that are not found in a dictionary. One is the nickname for Andy Lau, here better so say Liu Dehua: 华仔 (Hua Zai). Hua is taken from his first name Dehua and Zai means guy or boy. I guess it is similar to the Japanese "kun".
Then I found the word 粉丝 (fen si), which literally means glasnoodle, but in this context the English word "fans".

Btw, talking about crazy suicide. Last week I also read a strange story about a fake suicide. A 26 year old Chinese woman, who always loved to make jokes and thought this would keep her marriage life fresh, shocked her husband on April 1st this year with faking having hanged herself. Her husband was calling police and neighbours for help, thinking that his wife was dead, but when police arrived, the wife burt out laughing, calling "April fool". The very understandable result of this action: Her husband is tired of her stupd jokes and wants a divorce now.

Man, was it really October 2006 that I posted a blog last time? I know I'm lazy, but that lazy...

It's not that nothing happened in my life or that I didn't experience or see interesting things in China. In fact the last six months were the busiest in my whole life...

In October I got pregnant. In November I got married legally in Shanghai. In February I got married in church in Germany in my hometown Fuerth and my beloved husband and me went on a honeymoon to Spain. And in March we threw our Chinese wedding party. Yeah, just to make sure, it'll be for the rest ouf our life, we got married three times. :-)

Now that this fun part is over, we only have three months to go to prepare for the arrival of our kid. Our little one will be born in the beginning of July and we are very much excited about it.

In the meantime, apart from work, I keep myself busy with studying Chinese and Shanghainese. In the beginning I found this dialect very difficult, but now I find it more and more interesting and not only learn it for the sake of surviving in a Shanghainese family, but also because it is interesting and fun. And I can get a deeper understanding of the Shanghainese people.

So what is coming up (if I don't decide to give up writing again):
- How to get married in China (both legally and party)
- How to get married in Germany in a church
- What do to when you're pregnant in China
- Introduction to Shanghainese
- Odd experiences I had recently
- Interesting Chinese expressions I came across
- and the fooood. :-)

Shanghai:

ShanghaiBLOG - Christian Winzen: http://www.shanghaiblog.de/

Vom Nabel der Welt - Heike Schuhbeck berichtet aus Shanghai: http://blog.brigitte.de/shanghai/

China:

Dragon Girl aka Ellen Deng arbeitet im Pekinger stern-Büro und schreibt für Deutsche über China: http://www.stern.de/blog/33_dragon_girl

Chinaproblem alias Matthias Schepp eröffnete 1999 das Pekinger stern-Büro und schreibt über politische und wirtschaftliche Themen Chinas: http://www.stern.de/blog/5_chinaproblem

I just started teaching last week on the 25th of September and am on holiday again... This week is one of the three holiday seasons in China: October Holiday (National Holiday + Mid-Autumn Festival), Spring Festival and May Holiday. Before the holiday everybody was asking everybody about travelling plans. But all people I asked, replied that they won't travel because all places are too crowded since everbody's travelling. I also decided to stay at home, but started wondering why there are crowds everywhere, when in fact most people are not travelling to avoid the crowds...

Thursday we will go to Ye Fan's parents and stay with them until Saturday when we go to Grandma's. This will be my first Chinese family festival and I am sure on Sunday I will have a lot of stories to tell.

Right now I just spend my time working at home and redoing my homepage and stuff. But since I can just connect through phone line to internet it is quite tiring using the internet recently. In my office I do not have access to internet, but hopefully will soon have.

Yesterday when I went by cab and was just about to make a phone call, I was glancing outside and saw a small motorbike. In front a guy, behind him a woman. But, hey, what was that in between? A baby!!! Just squeezed between the two adults. Only in pyjama without any protection! The baby was definitely not older than a couple of months. I'm already used to seeing small children driving with their parents on scooters, but never such a small baby. And the father drove fast. When the lights turned green, the cab needed some time to catch up with them. I tried to take a pic of this family with my mobile phone, but was too slowly...

On Spiegel online I read an article about “Overheard in New York”. So here’s a bit of “Overheard in Shanghai”. Happened yesterday in our compound…

Woman A: “Hey, do you have pills against high blood pressure?
Woman B: “Yes, I have.”
Woman A: “You know, I’m going to play Majiang later. Better take some pills in advance.”

Links:
Spiegel article: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzkultur/0,1518,434217,00.html (German)
Overheard in New York: http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/ (English)

P.S.: There is also Overheard in Dublin, Singapore, Nairobi etc. and German sites. Just check out the Spiegel article for more links.

Yesterday I saw a Chinese albino on the bus. The hair was dyed black, but the eyebrows were completely white and the skin was very white and a little bit pink. Normally Chinese people have more yellow or light brown skin, so the white skin immediately caught my attention. But Chinese women dream of white skin and therefore use skin whitening cream (also very popular in Japan). Just today I saw a TV advertisement for such a cream. It claimed that the skin is whitened in just 15 minutes. Well, then I ask myself what kind of heavy chemicals are used for this. They showed the women before and after using the cream. Freaky. Honestly I do not want to have the skin color of Michael Jackson or Suzuki Sonoko. When you want to make a Chinese woman a compliment, you say “Your skin is so white.” In former times you would have said: “You gained weight.” (=i.e. “You look healthy and happy”), but this is not longer regarded as very charming. And as a matter of fact, a lot of Chinese women are skinny. Everyday I see many young girls that I would call anorexic.

But talking about the bus. Going by bus is my favorite transportation. There are around 800 bus lines in Shanghai (a rough guess). My best companion is now a little green book that contains information of most of the bus lines and bus stops. If you can read Chinese, going by bus is the cheapest and most interesting way to get around. For instance, if I go from my place to Tongji I pay 20 RMB by cab and only 2 RMB by bus. For going downtown I maybe would be pay 40 RMB by cab, but still 2 RMB by bus. For going to Ikea I would pay around 85 RMB by cab, but 6 RMB by bus plus metro. I always try to find a direct bus line to my destination or only change once. Sitting in the bus for a while I always have enough time to watch the streets and people and taking notes. Only during rush hour, when the buses are packed, it is not so comfortable. Sometimes it is also difficult to find the bus stop. The bus stops close to my home, where I get on and off, if I want to use the lines 59 and 874 are currently not marked as bus stops. I just found out, by watching the people standing at the street.
Normally the fee for the buses is 1 RMB for a bus without air conditioning and 2 RMB for buses with air conditioning. The fee does mostly not depend on for how many stops you take the bus. Only in rare cases you have to pay 3 RMB on the regular bus (airport buses are a different matter).

The day before yesterday was the first day I was freezing, not because of the air conditioning, but because of the cold temperature outside. When I arrived in Shanghai it was hot and humid, but recently the temperature dropped rapidly and the climate is the same like in Germany: cold and rainy. But I have to admit, that it is somehow a relieve, because now we don’t need to use air conditioning at home.
The second relieve: The street in front of our house is almost done. That’s not only good, so that our house is easier accessible, but we can also sleep through in the nights. The workers redoing the street have very strange and hard working hours. Starting early around 6.30 am, at some point in the afternoon it gets quiet, but after dinner time, latest starting from 8 pm the noisy work starts again and continues until deep in the night. Once I checked the time, when I woke up, because of the noise. It was 3.30 am! As the 100th anniversary of the university is close (next month), I guess that the workers are under strong time pressure to finish the construction work on the campus. I am quite sure, that they don’t get much for these kind of over hours. Workers on construction grounds are mainly migrant workers from poor rural areas, who work and live illegally in the big cities. The big economic development in China is built on the shoulders of those poor workers.