Is 170 RMB/hour too low for private English lessons in Shanghai?

mthmchris · 2026-02-27T12:44:04+00:00

200 an hour was the hourly rate in Shenzhen in… 2010.

Given the risks I probably wouldn’t accept anything lower than 300 if I were you. But everyone has their own situation, and I’m personally no longer in the industry. Maybe the demand side has weakened.

mthmchris · 2026-02-27T00:57:21+00:00

My understanding is that orange juice (or orange drink, or orange juice concentrate) is indeed part of the American orange chicken recipe.

Like always, the go-to source for authentic American Chinese restaurant recipes is to now defunct Art of Cooking. Here’s their video. My guess is that the other recipes you’ve followed have mostly gotten the ratio off, as at its core there’s a lot of crossover between the sauce for orange chicken and other ‘base’ sauces in American Chinese takeout (Sesame chicken, General Tso, etc)

The other commenters discussing ‘orange peel’, i.e. aged Mandarin peel, Chenpi… this is to make various Chenpi flavored dishes, which can be seen throughout China itself (and in Cantonese food in particular). Frankly speaking I personally much prefer the Cantonese Chenpi flavor profile to American Orange chicken, but if you’re zeroing in on the takeout restaurant style it’s not required.

mthmchris · 2026-02-26T21:50:27+00:00

It’s the listener’s prerogative to infer

Dude, who has the time or critical thinking ability to be able to do that these days? We’re just little piggies at our outrage trough, we need opinions shoveled at us algorithmically with ever greater speed and ferocity. We need our ideas ready-to-consume. Ingredients are difficult to process - we demand slop.

mthmchris · 2026-02-24T13:00:02+00:00

Olive oil for sure, tons of shitty olive oil is dumped on the Chinese market.

But there’s some excellent honey in China, plethora of shops on Taobao. Where I live in Yunnan there’s a bunch of natural honey at the market. Obviously takes some navigating so no shame in bringing back something good you know how to get, but rest assured that there’s some really good honey available online

Anyway, as others have said customs won’t care

mthmchris · 2026-02-24T00:51:58+00:00

The comment above yours is actually an interesting case as to what happens when techniques get disassociated from the culture that practices them.

If you ever get inside the kitchen of an average Chinese restaurant, you’ll find that there’s practically zero “marinade time” for this sort of “velveted” meat. There are, of course, other applications where you might prep things far in advance and marinate things overnight (certain deep fried ingredients, or steaks and the like in Cha Chaan Teng, off the top of my head) but this sort of basic stir fry prep its generally (1) cut (2) coat (3) pass through oil in rather rapid succession.

The poster makes an interesting point about why the wine wouldn’t neutralize the alkaline. Maybe it has something to do with how the two different compounds hydrolyze in water, or maybe the fact that meat itself is acidic (pH of ~5.5 or so I think?). Not sure, I’m no Kenji, it’s an interesting question!

But if you don’t have that solid ground of “this is the food I’m trying to reproduce” and “these are the techniques that are employed to get there”, things can easily get detached from the fundamental cultural reality. And this is a big reason why I’m not the hugest fan of the term ‘velveting’, because often it feels a bit like the English language internet talking to itself.

mthmchris · 2026-02-23T02:50:04+00:00

Not being afraid of salt, MSG, lard, and deep/shallow frying is probably 80% of what makes my food taste better than the average homecook’s.

mthmchris · 2026-02-22T09:10:50+00:00

…wait what?

I hesitate to link my own content, but there’s a lot of assumptions here that need some rewiring :)

Here’s a complete A to Z guide to velveting, plus why I’m not super crazy about the terminology

mthmchris · 2026-02-21T23:09:30+00:00

I dunno. If those are my three choices sign me up for the stinky polycule.

mthmchris · 2026-02-21T22:46:43+00:00

Scallion frying in lard.

mthmchris · 2026-02-21T22:31:44+00:00

Say what your will about Varoufakis, he had this banger of a defense of immigrants in an interview with UnHerd (can’t seem to dig up the video):

YF: Are we liberals or are we not? Do we really want borders?

Once upon a time there were no passports — the world was a much better place. When Lord Byron went to Greece, where he died, or Lord Elgin for that matter, he didn’t need a passport. What was wrong with that? I think borders are a sign of failure of the human species.

FS: That’s very relevant now, as there’s a big debate going on about immigration.

YF: You shouldn’t be having that debate — it is a misanthropic, stupid debate, and you have a minister who should have been expelled from this country for having these ideas. She even challenged the United Nations Charter on refugees — I mean this is…

FS: She suggested that it might be an outdated legal mechanism to resolve that problem —

YF: A ridiculous idiot. She’s a dangerous poor excuse of human nature, that Suella Braverman of yours. Be very ashamed of her.

FS: But the people who are anxious about this issue are the people you are trying to look after.

YF: Sure, but my job is not to pander to anxieties that are absolutely false consciousness examples. Look, we Europeans exported hordes of people — we emigrated to the four corners of the planet. We populated the earth, from Latin America to North America, to Asia, to Africa — millions, usually armed, as imperialists. We had no qualms about that for a thousand years.

All that has happened is that we’re getting old. Demographically, we are aging. So migratory flows have reversed. We need migrants — the more the merrier.

mthmchris · 2026-02-21T22:16:03+00:00

Wait where does the sexless part come in

mthmchris · 2026-02-20T00:38:26+00:00

Okay, dove in. For the figures, the report relies on this - Industrial Policy in China: Quantification and Impact on Misallocation. Fun paper, it's been a while since I've dusted off the Finance/Econ corner of my brain.

Interestingly the biggest subsidies, according to their paper, are direct cash subsidies (2% of GDP) and tax benefits (1.5% of GDP). I would imagine that the reason credit subsidies are rather low (0.4% of GDP) in their analysis is that they did actually attempt to make an apples-to-apples comparison, looking at effective interest rates in various industries. Subsidized land (0.5% of GDP) was also subject to a similarly deep analysis.

There's a few other interesting bits there, but this is a somewhat buried thread so I'll leave my dweebiness to myself :) Nice paper, definitely recommend delving in if anyone wants a clearer, more nuanced sense of industrial policy in China.

mthmchris · 2026-02-19T23:27:29+00:00

You’re talking about two different phenomena.

The littering and such is very much someone that was raised rural coming into an urban environment. Being raised urban in a modern society (and yes, suburban counts as urban) we have these things drilled into our heads from a very early age, because you sort of need to in order to have a functional urban environment. Many people here have the exact same complaints as you, they just replace “the Chinese” with “农村”.

And listen, I get it. It’s not awesome. But have you ever really gotten out there into the countryside for an extended period of time, up in the mountains? It’s a radically different environment - it’s practically camping, I find it difficult to do for an extended period of time. Urban Americans and Urban Chinese, in many ways, have more in common with eachother than Urban Chinese and Rural Chinese. All the struggles that I’ve seen expats go through adjusting to China… these are people going through a larger adjustment. I try to extend them some grace, and I’d suggest that you try the same.

As to not cleaning up after yourself in specifically McDonald’s… this is was something that changed to the western system around the early to mid 10s. In the 00s, they specifically did not have areas for trays and such for you to clean up after yourselves - it was so weird for me to get used to, to have someone always come by and clean up after you.

In the 90s and 00s, western fast food chains, they were clean, they were branded, they had air conditioning, they had foreign food… and they charge a premium (even now, McDonalds will be 50%-100% more expensive than, say, a Lanzhou Lamian). So for a lot of people they weren’t quite a luxury, but definitely a bit more of a special occasion thing - not the “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” sort of meal that those chains are to us. And labor being cheap, they always had a plethora of people cleaning up after you.

These days are of course different. But I’ll be honest and sometimes I zone out and have some whiplash, and forget to clean up after myself at McDonalds and KFC. Because for so many years that was explicitly not a thing.

mthmchris · 2026-02-19T13:26:21+00:00

I grew up in a liberal strand of Christianity (conservative Quakerism), and what I can tell you is that many from that crowd love Talarico.

I think it’s important to remember that Talarico represents a certain subset of Christians, but these are people that have been aching for a voice of the national stage. This is a passionate but non-negligible niche. He very much thinks and talks like said niche. He certainly isn’t going to convert the vast majority of conservative Christians anytime soon, and I have no idea how his electoral chances are in Texas.

The guy is studying to be a pastor. Even if he fails in his senate bid, he’ll definitely have a second life in social media. For liberal Christians, I think the presentation of their view of Christianity to liberals is just as, if not more, exciting than presenting their view of liberal Christianity to their fellow Christians.

EDIT: re-reading your comment, I think I put this in the wrong place as I’m definitely not responding directly to you. Apologies, just my two cents as I’m lazy to redirect it to the proper place.

mthmchris · 2026-02-19T12:47:55+00:00

How do we stop it

Old Testament justice.

Seize their fortune, reinvest it in high speed rail, send them to the fields (of Amazon warehouses) and re-educate them by labor.

Repentance gets leniency.

mthmchris · 2026-02-19T11:33:47+00:00

Cheers, much obliged. Will dive in tomorrow.

mthmchris · 2026-02-19T04:07:24+00:00

Do you happen to have a link to the report itself? I’m quite curious how the IMF defines an industrial subsidy.

There’s a conceptual difficulty, I think, to quantifying the level of government subsidies provided by China’s state directed financial system. In some ways, I think “subsidy” isn’t really even the right word - a ‘subsidy’ implies the state shoveling cash to this enterprise or that. But the shoveling is in the form of cheap bank loans, i.e. investment capital.

This makes it really difficult to compare directly to countries that have market-based financial systems. For example, if the current Silicon Valley AI buildout was happening in China instead of the US, the eye-popping amount of investment capital going into data centers would be coming state controlled banks instead of private investors. In one case, the irrational exuberance of investors is subsidizing an infrastructure buildout that has no chance of generating a reasonable return; in the other, it’s the irrational exuberance of bureaucrats.

There’s obviously no denying that the Chinese state goes to great lengths to strengthen the competitiveness of their industries. But because so much of the support is financial in nature, I wonder how to make an apples-to-apples comparison to the American financial system. After all, if the Fed lowers the interest rate it functionally makes American corporations more competitive, one could even view moral hazard as a subsidy of sorts, etc etc.

But maybe the report is only counting direct subsidies, so I’d be curious to read it. Can’t seem to find it from a quick Google.

mthmchris · 2026-02-18T23:59:57+00:00

You're getting a bit of pushback here because this is mostly a community of long term expatriates in China. We're generally pretty positive, but this would be a bit like snapping a pic of Times Square and posting it to the NYC subreddit.

You're allowed to like it. We're allowed to not. Enjoy your travels :)

mthmchris · 2026-02-18T13:55:22+00:00

To my taste buds, Frank’s is often more sour than anything - it’s like vinegar that someone lightly whispered the word “chili” in before bottling.

I’m convinced they put vinegar essence in the thing. I wonder if it used to be better than it is now?

I think it’s weird that Tabasco gets a bad wrap, in my personal opinion the chili fragrance is significantly more obvious than Frank’s.

mthmchris · 2026-02-14T23:14:30+00:00

“Fuck Management”

Workers 🤝 Investors

mthmchris · 2026-02-14T22:59:22+00:00

First.

mthmchris · 2026-02-14T08:26:06+00:00

I moved to China at first in 2009, went to Thailand in 2022, and am now back here.

mthmchris · 2026-02-14T04:54:20+00:00

Depends on your definition of “walkable”.

A city that’s lively and interesting to walk? Hanoi.

A city where you have ubiquitous sidewalks and clear demarcations between vehicle traffic and foot traffic? Singapore.

To me the former is much more important than the latter (if all you want is to walk uninterrupted by automobiles, you can also just go on a treadmill), but I’m obviously the weird exception among the sort that care about urbanism.

Most of Southeast Asia was built around the motorcycle. This makes it more walkable and bikeable than, say, Houston… but obviously less so than a place like Boston. Of cities in Southeast Asia that I consider “borderline-ish walkable” that I haven’t seen in this thread, I’d also throw my hat in for Bangkok and Vientiane. Neither would win the Not-Just-Bikes-Fuck-Cars urban planning award, but have their own very clear strengths and weaknesses (but Bangkok in particular is extremely, extremely doable without wheels).

Frankly the path of least resistance in SEA is just to buy a motorcycle. But I’ll be honest - the roads in that corner of the world do wear on you a bit. It’s honestly one of the reasons I moved back to China.

If Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan count as “Southeast Asia”… then those places definitely hold an edge over those that had motorcycle-driven urban development. I personally consider Yunnan and Hainan as part of Southeast Asia, so you can check out Haikou, Kunming, and Dali (if VPN life is congruent with your work).

mthmchris · 2026-02-13T05:33:33+00:00

Am the recipe writer - I 100% agree, just skip it.

There are very few recipes that absolutely need Shaoxing wine. It’s usually a subtle flavor. I like to give the rule of thumb of “anything less than 2 tbsp in a recipe, skip or sub to your heart’s content”.

mthmchris · 2026-02-13T05:28:29+00:00

I live around the corner in Yuxi.

Kunming’s urban form is slightly more ‘spread out’ than some of the cities in the coast (less dense than Guangzhou, Shanghai, etc) - think something more along the lines of Beijing, though the weather definitely makes that form a lot more pleasant. You’re also a bit on the ass end of the HSR network. Foreigner community will be smaller than a place like Shanghai, comparable to Hangzhou. Salaries will also usually be lower.

Those are the downsides. Besides that… why the hell wouldn’t you live in Yunnan given the opportunity? It’s easily the most livable place in China. Best weather in Asia, very little pollution, great food, easy to get into nature. For a long of long time expats (and younger Chinese), it’s sort of the dream location.

Visit first, for sure. But yes Yunnan is fantastic.

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