A bit of context: I studied the major advertising from 2010 to 2014 at the Willem de Kooning Academy (WDKA) in Rotterdam, and since 2019 I teach Branding at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art (SIVA). Despite the distance, both schools are actually very similar: The student’s age is the same and they have similar […]

From my childhood, I strongly recall the strange but pleasant smell of our sofa, the engine sound of my mom’s of Citroën AX, and the songs on the radio such as Steve Miller’s ‘The Joker’ and Henk Westbroek’s ‘Zelfs je naam is mooi’. And when I go back to that time, the worries of today […]

I never realized how important idioms, proverbs, and expressions are to language. I never had to. Not only did I always live in a Western culture, also English and Dutch are pretty close to each other. So close in fact, that we often just translate idioms (Rubbing salt in a wound / Zout in wond […]

There’s so much in this book. First, it feels so incredibly real because it’s reworked on existing history. I want to look up the events on Wikipedia, even though many never happened. Roth weaves his own coming of age into the story, and the characters feel so incredibly real. Each character unique — brought alive […]

The relationship between the author and reader is a bit of that of a parent and a child, a teacher and student, a falconer and a falcon. Make it too easy, plain, pedantic — and the reader switches off. Make it too difficult or abstract, and the same happens. It’s on the middle ground that […]

Marketing theory comes down to how you think marketing works. Imagine 全家FamilyMart would open up a 5-star restaurant in downtown Shanghai. Candles on the table, waiters suited up, silver cutlery. And FamilyMart would serve their microwave meals, touting their high-quality taste. It’d be fun, they’d invite 网红wanghong to magazines, and they’d get some serious PR. […]

A year ago, Shanghai was on lockdown. Everything closed except a few supermarkets with empty shelves. The humid cold seeped into our bones, along with the fear of the unknown virus. All the stories are surfacing now. A friend who lived in the Yangpu district had the first corona case in Yangpu reported in their […]

At the surface, this book tells about what the lives of poor factory workers are like — millions of them — but at a deeper level, Factory Girls explains so much of China’s migrant culture, which is present in so many Chinese people. From high to no education, young Chinese people leave their hometown to […]

“14:00 this Sunday?” someone asks in the WeChat group. Our chat is named ‘五人小场群Wǔ rén xiǎo chǎng qún’ (Five people small field group) and holds 36 guys from the neighborhood, including me. We play football without a schedule, usually weekly. Someone mentions a time, and critical mass (ten or more) either does or doesn’t form. […]

My New Year’s Resolution is to look for the good in people — as daft as it sounds. Because you see and feel what you look for. You can focus on bad shit and be totally right. But it’ll grow and grow until it becomes all of who you are. You can only be happy […]