“Did you grow?”, “No? What do you mean?”, “Well, I meant you maybe have grown fat.” A lady pruning flowers with all the patience in the world. She puts them in a vase before deciding they should be cut a bit shorter: “This is too high over the edge.” Another lady wears a green hat, […]

“可是”, which means ‘but’, was my filler word in Chinese, until Eva started making fun of me I started to change it. Every time I said 可是 she screamed “BUT!!!!!” Like: “It’s not perfect 可是 we can still go there” “BUT!!!!!” “This thing is that 可是 that thing is this” “BUT!!!!!” “It’s raining 可是 it’s […]

My first speech in Chinese after learning for 3 years with GoEast Mandarin! I didn’t speak perfectly, but I’m pretty satisfied! It’s a bit above my language level, and I rehearsed pretty hard for this, the new vocabulary and sentence structures. This speech was given Saturday 4th of December 2021 in Shanghai — during the […]

Written for Dao Insights You might have come across lots of fruits produced by Alibaba’s PR labours, parading its sustainability efforts done for this year’s Double 11, which coincided with COP26. CampaignAsia wrote Double 11 was less about the discounts and that sustainability is top of mind. Other English media outlets such as Reuters, SMCP, […]

Together with art collective RunShi (润识), GoEast is exhibiting Banana Wang (王香蕉)’s colorful bulldog paintings. Here we sit down with Banana to ask her about her work. Jaap: Do you think art should have a higher meaning or purpose? 你认为你更高的艺术理想是什么？ Banana: Hmmm. I want to put myself in the history books. As for the message, […]

Description + telephone. In our increasingly complex society, I really like this type of simple advertising. Three numbers for a 船中介 (Shipping company) in Kunshan — all sorts of things in Beijing — and 有事买 & 打深井 & 卖空调 (Stuff to buy & dig deep & sell air conditioners) in Nantong.

Kunshan is where the high-speed way train stops to unload passengers, where people refuel their car, or where an English teacher first starts working in China before realizing there’s nothing to do there and moves to a better place. Kunshan’s biggest benefit is often described as; “well, it’s close to Shanghai”, or; “yeah, there is […]

Most talk about cultural differences is pretty superficial. So in the Netherlands, it’s rude to keep your coat on while visiting people’s home, while Chinese people don’t like to shake hands as much as Dutch people do — let alone how French or Italian people touch cheeks. You should not wear a green hat in […]

I was watching Scott & Ella from Fragrant Mandarin in this video where Ella speaks Mandarin and Scott simply replies in English. It felt so natural. I looked for multi-language poems but could find nothing. Then I used the article ‘Heem‘ because it’s short, simple sentences and the meaning fits this nicely. I tweaked it […]

I work in advertising, marketing — and what I love most about developing creative campaigns is that it’s such a joyous and all-absorbing mental challenge. It’s a competition against other agencies and brands — trying to outfox them — combining both thinking and intuition. The creative process is surrounded by data. We can test advertisements […]