Notes from a small Chinese town — Yongkang, Zhejiang — written in English: building, driving, and daily life beyond the big cities.
This is the side gate of the neighborhood that everyone in my city agrees is the most expensive one. I walked past it, took a photo, and then did the thing I always do — went home and looked up the actual numbers. They were stranger than I expected. Short answer: the villas in here
After dinner I walked through the industrial museum here in my hometown — Yongkang, the small city in Zhejiang that supplies a surprising share of China’s hardware. On the wall, behind glass, was a framed certificate from 1978. Yellowed paper, red and gold border, a five-pointed star at the top. What stopped me was the
A few days ago we went out for a drive and I took the Li Auto i6 onto the highway. At the toll plaza I still had to stop and take a paper ticket, like it was 2010. When I asked why, the answer was simple: the car’s built-in ETC had never been activated, and
I went back to the village this weekend and noticed something new: every pond now has a line of colorful floats strung around the entire water’s edge, like a necklace around the pond. They weren’t there last year. So what are they for? They’re a drowning-prevention lifeline. And there’s a story that shows they actually
This weekend I drove to Hangzhou to pick up supplies, and somewhere on the way I pulled into the West Lake Service Area (西湖服务区) — a highway rest stop. From the outside, I genuinely could not tell it was a rest stop. It looked like a small shopping mall. Inside, it has two floors. The
I was out running errands the other day when I spotted one: a JMC Baodian, parked by the side of the road. And just like that, I was back in 2005. Because here’s the thing about this truck — in my town, between roughly 2000 and 2010, the JMC Baodian was the dream car of
I’ve never really understood how septic tanks work. Ours is just three pits in the ground — three chambers, no moving parts, no pumps. And with a family of five using it every day, I keep coming back to the same question: Won’t it eventually fill up? And if it fills up, then what? Short
I was eating lunch on the pedestrian street the other day when I looked up and saw it again: a building with a flying saucer on the roof. I’d seen this silhouette before — at a hotel restaurant in our town that has two flying saucers sitting on top of it. And now here was
I got a text message from the traffic police this week that genuinely surprised me. It said I’d been photographed failing to follow a traffic sign or lane marking — and I immediately knew what it was: I’d driven straight ahead from a right-turn lane. My mistake, caught by a camera. The message said the
Driving home from work the other day, I passed Garden Avenue and saw the Audi dealership being torn down. Sixteen years ago, when it opened, it was the first Audi 4S store our town had ever seen. A week earlier, the space had been turned into a NIO showroom for a while — and now