My Aunt Shirley used to say of some essential household tool: "I can't keep house without it!" And I sometimes feel that way in China.

One aspect of living abroad is that some very basic activities and routines are conducted differently, including housecleaning.
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Take the simple act of sweeping the floor, for example. In the west, we use a long-handled broom and hold it with both hands. The disadvantage is that you need someone to hold the dustpan for you, or you awkwardly try to handle both broom and dustpan.
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 But sweeping evolved differently in China. Here, the brooms are shorter and are used with one hand and the motion feels different...

Becky Yances of the blog, Writer, Traveler, Tea Drinker has written an informative post about how in China, everybody (save for the white-haired) pays with their phones now. It's all based on using QR codes. 

I recently dabbled a toe in these digital waters. The fact is, when we moved to China, Ross and I stopped using debit and credit cards for the most part and started paying for everything in cash, and I really liked it.
​I felt in much better touch with my money, figuratively speaking. Of course, life is simpler here, in that there are fewer things I need to pay for, since I don't own a home and could get meals at the school dining hall. 

But over the last few years, we noticed that people were just waving their phones to pay for things. Or we would go to pick up the bill at lunch and our guest would inform us, "Too late, I already paid on my phone." (Arguing over the meal tab is a thing in China.)

Inevitably, I had to move with the times. So I learned how (that is, a student showed me which buttons to push) to link my bank account to the phone, and use two services, Alipay and WeChat, to receive and give payments...

It is often said that Jane Austen didn't write any scenes with only men present. And the reason given is because men were outside of her sweet-little-country-spinster sphere of reference--how could she write about creatures she never knew? Who knows what the guys talk about when the ladies have excused themselves from the dinner table?

I suspect that a more compelling reason for Austen to limit her all-male scenes is that most of her readers are women, and women like stories with women in them. Don't we?  We don't want to see a war movie unless there is a romantic interest included, and women are on the covers of women's magazines, not men. Austen read a lot of novels and carefully analyzed them, making note of what she thought was ridiculous or implausible or preachy. She was a great innovator as a writer but she was a shrewd, self-aware writer as well, avoiding subjects and spheres of life that she felt didn't suit her authorial voice...