I pinch-hit for Kaiser on the back page of That's Beijing's January issue. Thanks to my stint in Shanghai it's the first time in nearly a year that I've written something for them. Fittingly, I wrote about moving back to Beijing from Shanghai. The column is finally online:

Ich Bin Ein Beijinger: Beijing Reloaded

"You’re going to hate it,” said one of my friends when I announced I was being relocated to Shanghai. “It’s a crap town,” he concluded helpfully.

His sentiments were widely repeated by other friends. These were hard men, toughened by years of life in the smoky capital. Men who nursed appalling memories of Beijing in the dark days of the mid-’90s, when the only bars were in the basements of mildewed, state-owned hotels and one had to bicycle for four hours through freezing, Siberian wind to buy cheese.

Loaded with such traumatic memories, it was a wonder that these were the people telling me I should stay. In any event, I couldn’t relate to their woeful tales. In 2004, when I arrived in Beijing, I didn’t have to bike anywhere for anything. Cheese, apparently the yardstick of Western comfort, was abundant and could be delivered to your front door with a phone call, conveniently spread across the top of a pizza. 

Read the whole thing here.

NB: Kaiser's personal blog is languishing these days thanks to his work on Ogilvy China's Digital Watch. In a fittingly post-modern measure of his notoriety, however, he does have a Wikipedia entry. Unfortunately, it's rather brief and doesn't quite do justice to him. I am considering expanding it. For a small fee, I won't.