Being poor is a cycle

Kids from rich parents spend their weekends doing extra classes, like maths and English and public speaking, while kids from poorer parents spend their weekends watching videos in the store or restaurant while their parents work. All-day. It’s the same all over the world. Poor people spend more time behind the television, less time with friends, and eat less healthily. It’s sad on a really deep level. Poor people aren’t poor because they make bad decisions. They are poor because they don’t get the same amount of chances.

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Degrees of wealth

Degrees of wealth

In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China? Neither question is […]
July 11, 2026
Goodbye to Guanyin

Goodbye to Guanyin

It’s a Saturday morning, and we’re in a taxi on the way to the airport. My clothes cling to my body and already reek of sweat, and that’s even before our 12-hour flight has started. Today I woke up at 5:30 to get up early and throw away the last furniture and items we used […]
June 30, 2026
Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Learning Chinese, or any language, makes you more aware of language in general. And one thing that surprised me is that, despite Mandarin being so different from my mother tongue (Dutch), both languages reach for the same units when weighing things: the kilogram (公斤, gōngjīn) and the half-kilogram (斤, jīn). It’s a small thing, but […]
June 24, 2026
Cake and Timepieces

Cake and Timepieces

There are multiple ways to define Shanghai. There’s the more modern version, with beautiful lanes full of expensive yoga studios or artisan coffee shops, lined with the London Plane Tree (法国梧桐) and the Wukang Mansion (武康大楼), and renovated parks like the North Bund (北外滩) and West Bund (西岸). There’s also the Shanghai as the international […]
June 23, 2026