Kickstarter

Can you believe it's only been a week since I hit the shiny launch button, and Multi Entry has already raised over $9000?!? There's no way that can be right! Y'ALL ARE AMAZING, all 159 of you. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU so much for giving me a week of feeling like this:

Aside from dancing around excitedly, I've also been having amazing conversations: with friends and acquaintances, with the people in China they've introduced me to, and even with total strangers who have offered their support and enthusiasm. Following up on all these leads has been really exciting but also a bit overwhelming, so please be patient with me—if I owe you an email or message, I haven't forgotten about it!

If you haven't reached out yet, and have any questions/suggestions/thoughts about anything so far, please get in touch via the Kickstarter messaging system or hit me up on Twitter at @xuhulk. I turned my DMs on, so slide on in. (Unless you're a spammy Kickstarter consulting agency, in which case your tactics are bad and you should feel bad.)

Stretch Goals & Hasty Decisions
Since it looks like we have a pretty good shot of hitting the goal at this point, I'm going to spend this week calling printers and researching stretch goal options for making the Travel Companion longer and more awesome—I'll share what I find in the next update!

In the meantime, I have a more ridiculous idea. I've joked for years about getting a "Made in China" tattoo around my FOB mark (you know, that smallpox vaccine scar you have on your upper arm if you were born outside of the United States). If this campaign hits $20,000, I will totally get that tattoo. I'm so serious about it, I asked fellow Orbital member and overqualified comic artist Amy Reeder to mock it up.

If this happens, I'll also throw in a bunch of temporary tattoos using the exact same design into every sticker pack so that you can rep this in a less, uh, permanent way. Come on, internet. You have 22 days to publicly, visibly brand me as a FOB for LIFE. Let's make it happen...???!???! 

Love to the point of mild delusion,
Christina

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P.S. Preparing for the trip means that I'm spending even more time reading random stuff about China than usual. I figured I'd share the best of what I find each week with you all, so here comes the first...

Multi Entry Recommends:

* Motherboard wrote a great profile about the army of volunteer subtitlers that pirate and translate popular US/European shows, such as Sherlock. Chinese fans are obsessed with shipping Sherlock (卷福, or "Curly[-haired] Fu") and Watson (花生, "peanut" but also a bastardized transliteration of "Watson")!

* Open City has an amazing interview with Pearl Chow, a woman who's lived in Flushing, New York since the 1940s. My favorite part of the piece is where she talks about going to "record hops" to meet other young Chinese people back in the 1940s and 50s—can you even imagine??

* Hannah Giorgis, an Ethiopian-American writer, wrote a really lovely essay about what it means to be bilingual & a writer & an immigrant with family who can't read your work, even when it's about them. I know that feel!

* Finally, Angela Tchou braved a lot of shots for this piece about baijiu (Chinese hard liquor) and family and chasing after things that remind you of home. While I still only have an alcoholic tolerance of one (1) beer per night, it made me want to give baijiu a chance.