🐯 Welcome to the Jungle: The Official Den of Johnny (Tiger) Tai

One of my favorite jokes is that Chinese people are the only people Chinese people are racist against. And before anybody gets upset, relax. I’m Chinese,  I was born Chinese, I grew up Chinese, my parents are Chinese, my relatives are Chinese. I’ve spent over forty years dealing with Chinese people; I think I’ve earned the right to bitch :) The funny thing is that whenever I make this joke, every Chinese person within hearing distance immediately starts nodding and chuckling. Not cautiously, not politely—just full recognition, like I’ve just said something everybody already agreed on but nobody wanted to say out loud. Now I’m not saying Chinese people are uniquely terrible. Every culture has its own internal chaos. But there is something uniquely funny about how a Chinese person can walk into a room full of Chinese people and immediately find twenty-seven reasons to dislike the other Chinese people in that same room. In the video attached to this post, I go into the ...

Before we talk about professional begging in China, let me start with a story my father once told me—one that’s completely true, a little grim, and very revealing. Because I’ve been blind since childhood, my father always had a soft spot for disabled beggars. Back in the 1980s, he was extremely wealthy, powerful, and well-connected—let’s just say not the kind of man most people argued with. Still, whenever he saw a disabled person struggling, he would stop his car to help them cross the street. If a beggar was visibly disabled, he always gave money. One night at a Taiwanese night market, he noticed a beggar sitting by the roadside. The man appeared to have no arms—empty sleeves hanging at his sides. My father didn’t have much cash on him at the time, so he gave the man $50. Later, feeling it wasn’t enough, he went to the bank, withdrew more money, and returned to give the beggar more. But just as he reached the nearby parking lot, he saw the same man walking away from...