A U.S. Army soldier posted in Baghdad is writing a blog in Chinese about his experiences. He is ethnically Chinese but identifies himself as Striker (or its phonetic equivalent in Chinese – 斯特瑞克), and hosts his blog on MySpace.cn, the version of the social networking site that is hosted and run out of Beijing.
His blog has become popular in recent weeks in the Mainland, discussed on forum websites like Tianya, and Striker has taken to answering questions from his fans, such as ‘How do you join the U.S. Army?’ and ‘Is any of your military clothing made in China?’.
He recently uploaded to Youtube a video he had shot just before the end of 2007, with Chinese captions explaining what the footage shows.
Uploading to the blog is no simple matter: this is how he describes the process:
After returning the base in Iraq, the connection speed is crap and it can’t display Chinese. Whenever we have leave, the soldiers line up to use the Internet to send news to their family. There’s not much meat and a lot of wolves so everyone only has ten minutes each. I can’t see my Chinese blog, so I can’t update regularly or respond to questions from Net friends, I’m sorry about that.
All I can do is sit in the Iraqi desert, or in the cramped interior of an armored vehicle. If I have time, I record my thoughts into a small MP3 recorder, then I send the recordings to the small Pacific island of Hawaii. Then my family members transcribe the recordings and upload them to the website in China. Every blog post has to go painstakingly like this from the Middle East to America to Asia.
- Striker’s blog (Chinese)
- Tianya (Chinese): Striker: documenting the U.S. Army in Iraq in Chinese and with photos