Andre’s Reviews > Sommerferien in Peking > Status Update

Ok, in that little glossary at the end she mentions Mao, the cultural revolution and Mao's great hunger... but not the Beijing massacres?

Hm classifcation regarding nationality/ethnicity is kind of confusing to me here. Now the author speaks of "us", clearly meaning German... Really in fact confusing. It's kind of switching back and forth.

Ok, calling someone a "banana" is at least implied to be wrong, but "long nose" is ok?

Ok, the story behind the peking duck was funny, but I really wonder what sort of usage of the word "banana" the auhor, respectively her characters have. Since "banana" infers that you look Chinese but act like a Westerner, here German. And I am not aware that this is applied to half-bloods. And do people from Beijing usually refer to people like Lisa as Chinese?

Ok, this girl really sees a tad too much to make her Chinese family average. It is not overdone, but close in my eyes.
Plus her talks about eating all parts of a duck makes me hungry and remember how long its been that I ate liver.

I really wander what sort of classification system the author uses. I get why she refers to Bin as a banana, but to Lisa? She didn't just live in Germany, she is a german by ancestry, so why a "banana?"
And as much credit as I can give the author for e.g. having Mrs. Hong with natural curls, but sometimes her depiction of white people seems a tad visual stereotyping in my mind.

Ah, it was in Beijing… I was wondering why she speaks about SARS so vividly when he was in Germany, but this must have been shortly, a year or so, before they moved. However she was still in school so she must have been a first grader.
Also is Ping's father a reference to Jiang Yanyong who reported the number of SARS cases in "Beijing's SARS Attack"?

Finally some Chinese guy refers to her as a German. I found this all around acceptance so far pretty odd.

Is she implying that doing Taiji is in her blood? This is odd, sure it could refer to her father and not mother but still… I already wondered why she suddenly wants to learn Taiji if she never had any interest in it. Sure she was stated to change her mind quickly regarding interests, but considered that she was embarrassed by her father doing Taiji why is she so interested now?

I get cultural differences, but what Ping's grandpa says here makes no sense. He thinks Ping did something wrong by defending himself and when enough people had berated the attacker he would have stopped. Small problem: There were already several of people looking at them and they didn't say one word of berating and the guy was attacking Ping directly. What was he supposed to do? Let himself be beaten up?