We’d bought quite a nice one, actually.  It had made sense because we were only the second people ever to have lived in that apartment. Everything was very modern and sleek in there, though it was also restrictively small.  We’d previously satisfied ourselves with cheap water dispensers, usually in the ghastly blue and white of those tracksuit high school uniforms (when will these trends end?).  This time, we’d plumped for something black and dark gold, something like real furniture. Tall, free-standing. Space for paper cups down there. When we moved again, it came...

The Stroop Test is a psychological test designed to demonstrate how closely human attention is attracted to the written word. For adult readers, textual information trumps other forms of visual information, including colour information, in provoking the brain. We could be reading banana written, in purple letters, but the colour we perceive is still yellow, because semantics somehow shout louder. This affected me while in our new bathroom last month. Naturally, I was wondering what kind of tea I wanted to start the day with, strumming the spectrum of camellia sinensis...

If there’s one food that’s emblematic of everyday indulgence, that’s chocolate. Delicious for most of us yet inextricably connected with fat, sugar (and caffeine, if you’re worried about that).  When my 4-year old daughter went for her second tooth-filling last month, the obvious culprit was chocolate. Yes, we are raising her in Shanghai, the saccharine city. And, yes, I should have instilled and enforced better brushing. But, rightly or wrongly, it was her fondness for chocolate that received the headline blame. Dear readers, there may among you be some attempting to quit...

“It’s just like sending gifts to myself!” It’s often said that the charm of Taobao is in the 4-day-long narrative it establishes. You order the products distractedly on your phone, return your full attention to work or family… and then, just when you have forgotten all about it, there’s a surprise knock at the door! Well, I guess I’m too materialistic for any of that forgetting. The childish excitement of Christmas Eve still dances in me for all 4 days. There’s also the nagging awareness that I may need to send...