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By Tara Overzat I struggle to live in the “now.” As kids, this was so easy. Why is it so hard as adults? Maybe becuase we can’t shake the shackles of our memories, both good and bad. We want to
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Posts in category China
Chinese Marriage Fraud- How the Few Denigrate the Many
By Tara Overzat Desperate times, desperate measures. Young, pretty girls trapped in a Communist country, where college grads are hugely disproportionate to available jobs, where the middle class is growing but hundreds of millions of peasants still work the soil, and where unattractive, unsuccessful foreign men go to escape,
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Cheating on the Rise?
By Tara Overzat Cheating was ubiquitous when I was an expat in China. I witnessed firsthand the cavalier expatriates and frequent businessmen to Asia who cheated on their wives. One clever man told me
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All That Glitters
I wrote this article last August, a few days after the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Sadly, I think little has changed, as stories of corruption and violence continue to leak out of the tightly controlled Chinese media. The original article can be found at The Atlasphere. ********************** All That Glitters by Tara Overzat [...]
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How to Teach in China
by Tara Overzat I’m often asked how my teaching experience was in China. While I love teaching and would say my overall experience was good, there are some pitfalls that future teachers going to China and elsewhere may want to keep in mind. 1) Fake contracts. I actually left the safety and comfort of America [...]
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Visas, City Lights, Bacalhau à Brás, and Casinos
by Tara Overzat The first time I did this South China/Hong Kong trip, it was a result of a lot of chutzpah and some half-assed planning with a Lonely Planet book (I highly recommend getting the most recent version of the book available before traveling to China— their information, while not perfect is pretty spot [...]
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ZhongGuo Huan Ying Ni (Welcome to China)
by Tara Overzat Going back to China for vacation was a weird combination of going back to somewhere familiar while having a new eye-opening experience. I cavalierly did very little planning, being familiar with the language and culture and having been to most of the places on our itinerary before. In retrospect, a little bit [...]
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Blown Back On Course
by Tara Overzat After months of ennui at my sales job, I met Jared*. I had signed up for a profile on Match.com, and admittedly did it for a lot of the same reasons people create facebook and MySpace profiles today- to have something on the web that expressed my personality and likes that was [...]
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The Sky is Falling for Tian Wenhua – But is it Fair?
by Tara Overzat Tian Wenhua has pleaded guilty to the charges facing her in court, charges that hold a penalty up to (& likely) the death penalty. How does one come to the conclusion that their death is okay? Is her advanced age (Tian is 66) a factor? How do her children feel about this? [...]
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The SanLu Trials – Will the killing ever stop?
by Tara Overzat Reports are sketchy, but it appears that a total of 20 people have already been put on criminal trial, or are about to be, in the SanLu tainted milk scandal. These include Tian Wenhua, the former head of SanLu and dubious recipient of the 2006 Women’s World Excellence Award, other executives in [...]
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