Ralph Jennings is a journalist who has contributed advice columns to the Beijing-based 21st Century newspaper since 2000.
I was working at the China Daily eleven years ago. One day, during an editing shift, a colleague suddenly popped up beside my desk and said the paper’s English-language weekly 21st Century needed an advice columnist and could I do the job.
Sure, I said, but I don’t know what to tell the 10 to 15 people who write in every week with complaints about dark family pasts, bad breakups, test score distress, scholarship corruption and college roommates who steal things.
I have written the “Just Ask” column ever since then, as much as to give the people behind the letters a few trashy lines of advice that they could have thought of themselves as to learn from the students about how things work in China.
The column, which I now write from my kitchen table in Taipei, has become my telescope into the fractious, conflicted lives of the weekly paper’s main readers: Chinese students from grades six through grad school.
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