Lisa Mason shows a gallery of photos of Tiger Woods smiling big at the WGC-HSBC Champions at Sheshan International Gold Club in Shanghai, China on November 3, 2010.
She says, “He looks truly happy in these photos. Maybe he is finding some happiness again.”
China is building golf courses and China’s growing middle class is taking up golf.
The Golf Travel Gurusays that Hainan Island in the South China Sea is China’s answer to Hawaii and is one of Asia’s finest golfing destinations, with several world-class courses.
Golf Todaysays the first thing one notices about golf in China – after marveling at the game’s sudden popularity – is how many players seem to have decent swings.
In fact, Golf Today says, golf is the latest fashion in Beijing and it is estimated there are 100,000 golfers in China. “The number should double in five years,” T. K. Pen, a Taiwanese-American investor says.
Meanwhile, officials in China are being careful. Golf Today says there are so manygolf courses in China the government is losing count.
Golf courses take up a lot of land. With more than 1.3 billion people to feed, the central government has declared a moratorium on course construction.
However, Slate says, “Almost all of the nation’s 600 or so completed golf courses are illegal in some way.”
Since China grows food on about 10% of its land, turning croplands into golf courses may not be the best way to make a profit.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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The last decade has seen Macao’s gambling industry grow at supersonic speeds.
Since Macau was returned to China in 1999, it has overtaken Las Vegas to become the world’s biggest gambling mecca.
The next building trend was to expand into a global entertainment and high end shopping hub along with leisure activities, but that has not matched the success of gambling.
Gambling remains Macao’s main money maker. Almost every business depends on gambling to survive.
However, the days of Chinese Triads having shooting wars for control of the streets have gone.
Instead, Macao has become a territory where Chinese democracy advocates may speak out without fear and become elected to Macao’s legislature.
The PRC has promised not to meddle in Macao’s politics.
One thing seems apparent. Many in Macao want the economy to have diversity that does not need to rely on gambling.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Most Westerns, specifically Americans, when he or she sees the word “China” in the Chicago Sun-Times headline will believe this is another example of China’s corruption and that impression will continue after reading the piece.
In fact, the headline should have read, “MGM picks reputed Macao crime family over N.J.”
Macao is not China even though it technically belongs of the People’s Republic. The World History Blog provides a short history of the former Portuguese colony, which is a Special Administrative Region in China today but has more in common with the Principality of Monaco or Las Vegas.
Macao’s location was first settled by members of the South Sung Dynasty escaping invading Mongols in 1277. Later, in 1516, Portuguese traders built a staging port there, the oldest European settlement in the Far East.
The Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1643) did not recognize that Portugal ruled over Macao and collected rent until 1849 when the Portuguese, taking advantage of China’s defeat during the first opium war with England and France, declared Macau’s independence from China.
Old Macau in 1960
Britannica tells us that Macao was returned to China in 1999. However, the transfer agreement allowed Macao to govern itself with a one-house legislature and a legal system based on Portuguese law — not China’s legal system.
Macao has a small security force to protect the 11.3 square mile (29.2 square kilometer) area, but defense is the responsibility of the central government in Beijing.
Since 2000, the gambling and tourist industry has been increasingly important to Macao’s economy and the city has become the playground of global tourists, nearby Hong Kong and wealthy mainland Chinese.
David Campion says, “As in Havana and Las Vegas, the gambling economy in Macau was first built up and its rules enforced by clever and well-organized gangsters, here called Triads. Once a date was set for the departure of the Portuguese, the Triads fought amongst each other viciously for greater control over the territory before the PRC was due to come in and rain on their parade (which it didn’t, as it turned out).”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
If there ever was an expat author in the Middle Kingdom whose enthusiasm and love of life was as contagious as Cecilie Gamst Berg’s, then that person has yet to be published.
Part travelogue of a directionless backpacker, part bedtime stories of a frisky European babe who enjoys seducing young Chinese guys “out of the festering prison of virginity,”
Blonde Lotus is in fact one in the same person. Gamst Berg, via her alter-ego protagonist Kat Glasø, accidentally arrives in late-1980’s China (“all I wanted was to be on the train; I had no interest in the journey’s destination, Beijing”), back when the mighty bicycle was still king of Peking and foreign tourists were a rare sighting.
Expecting a people with “long, billowing sleeves, reciting poetry and plucking at stringed instruments,” what Kat finds in New China instead are street corners populated with shady money changers and young hipsters whose knowledge of English is limited to the words ‘Okay-la’ and ‘Sex!’ Lulled by their charming incessancy, Kat shrugs her shoulders and good-naturedly gives it to them – the money AND the sex. “How could so many men find the women of a race attractive, and so few women find the men the same,” she ponders postcoitally over a shared Zhongnanhai cigarette.
Queen gweipo (devil woman in Cantonese) Gamst Berg is an unpretentious, fun-loving writer with nothing to prove. She’s not out to save China as so many a self-righteous foreigner here are (“I hope this country never modernizes” Kat admits in one of her many blunt moments of sincerity), she’s not trying to force feed them Faulkner (“I loved books and he never read one”), nor is she out to land a career in journalism like the rest of us.
No, the author is clearly just looking to have a good time (“We were young, stoned and in China”), and maybe learn some Putonghua while doing it, and therefore spares us the sappy, sympathetic observations and “deep understanding” of life in China that makes most Laowai Literature such a torture to read.
Conversely, nor is Gamst Berg out to tear Communism apart, vilify Chinese people or point and laugh at the “strangeness” of their culture, a common last-resort for some western travel writers (whom I refrain from naming as a professional courtesy) who don’t want to admit that they have learned nothing about the Chinese during their stay here.
Indeed, while her fellow expats spend their time in China sitting around at bars “shouting out orders in English, and when they weren’t understood, complained loudly to each other about how stupid the Chinese were,” rather than join in, Kat moves tables, literally and figuratively, to the Chinese side of the bar.
Instead of whining about China’s infamously filthy public toilets, Kat hangs out in them (smoking dope), then laughs when there’s a line of squeaming girls waiting to use the stall.
Rather than bitch about the People’s Republic’s chaotic queues at its railway stations, she jumps right in, elbows swinging, with the rest of the seething proletariat.
Our Blonde Lotus ain’t no saint, and she would laugh in your face if you dared suggest it. “I wanted to experience everything and sleep with everybody…” confesses, nay, asserts the Norwegian-born Kat Glasø – and then proceeds to actually do so, from coal-and-petrol-scented industrial North China all the way down to the steamy islands of Hong Kong, her final destination.
Throughout her candid memoir, the author employs an uproarious combination of reluctant intellectualism (“learning Chinese was better than being in love because there was no danger of waking next to the Chinese language wanting to kick the f*cker out of bed”) and ribald hedonism (“I felt something push into me, shudder and expire. Was it an asparagus?”) that is sure to win Gamst Berg as many fans as frighten them away.
If Blonde Lotus is a window into China, then that window has been fogged with the sultry breathe of its occupants. If it is a work of reportage; then the author was too distracted by eating, drinking, smoking and playing cards with the peasantry to be concerned about making the front page. And that nonchalance, that self-depreciating humor, is exactly this novel’s charm.
Blonde Lotus is a refreshingly unserious memoir of an infectiously upbeat young woman (this reviewer’s favorite line in the whole book: “Ha ha, life was perfect and made for me!”) who, lost in China and unsure of what she wants to do with said life – as many of our kind are – inadvertently ends up making a new, better one for herself.
I admit that that I was surprised when I saw this video of a group of Americans finding enlightenment in China.
The popular stereotype about someone searching for change and enlightenment fits the plot we find in Eat, Pray, Love, a best seller that was made into a movie with Julia Roberts, where Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir takes her to Italy for pleasure, India for enlightenment and Indonesia where she discovers love again – not China.
In this video, we see a group of Kung Fu and Tai Chi students from the U.S. in search of Kung Fu wisdom in China.
While in China, they visit Chinese families, schools, temples and universities. They travel through both ancient and modern China visiting Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai.
After surviving personal conflicts and emotional struggles, the group returns to America as Elizabeth Gilbert did in her journey—to be compassionate and harmonious with others and the environment.
In three weeks, this group went places few foreigners have seen.
Of course, after breaking bones twice during martial arts training earlier in life, I’ve stayed away from that form of discovery.
I still climb mountains but not as often as I once did.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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