Not long after I started coming to China, I discovered that it was difficult to explain to people here that I was the media columnist for the New York Observer: oh, you write for a newspaper? What about? Well, I write about newspapers. No, you already said you write for a newspaper, but what do you write about?
With luck, I could break out of the loop by steering the conversation to the newspaper itself. Even when everyone involved is an American-born English speaker, trying to describe the New York Observer tends to be a conversation-stopper. But in China, there was a universally helpful answer: it's probably best known, I would say, as the newspaper that first ran the "Sex and the City" column. Oh, I LOVE that show! would come the reply, and people would start talking about HBO instead of about me.
So in honor of the arrival of the Sex and the City movie, I headed over to Houhai, to the Sex and da City bar. With considerable help from the dauntless Jodi Xu, I talked to the people there to see what constitutes Sex and the City in the Chinese context (A: less expensive shoes, for starters, and more pole dancing).
