Popcorn with Chinese Characteristics
I well remember the first time I encountered a street-side popcorn vendor in China. It was way back in September of1984, during my first year as an English teacher in Zhengzhou, Henan Province. I had...
View ArticleReading Assignment – Youth and Women in China
I'm starting a new (hopefully) regular feature on this blog — weekly reading assignments. I will highlight a few of the interesting articles or posts about China that I've run across in the course of...
View ArticleChinese and North Korea
With the news today of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's death, many are looking to China and wondering how it will react. Officially China is North Korea's closest ally ("as close as lips and teeth"...
View ArticleLiterary Journey — The Early 1980’s
In 1984 I set off for China to teach English for a year. Before I left, the organization that I was working for sent me a book to read. It was the first book about China that I remember reading. Just...
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Sneaking a Piano into a Labor Camp
During the Cultural Revolution, Zhu Xiao-mei, a budding pianist at the Beijing Music Conservatory was sent (along with some of her classmates) to a labor camp near Zhangjiakou, a small city about 100...
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The Smoke is Nothing New
A big story in the news in China this week was a yellow haze that enveloped the central city of Wuhan. A couple of netizens went online and suggested that it was the result of a chlorine leak, which...
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One Neighborhood, Two Perspectives
A few weeks ago as I was savoring the pictures in a great photo essay on The Atlantic website called Scenes from 21st Century China, my eyes lingered on photo #37 because the caption said it was a...
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My Brief Brush with (non) Olympic Glory
I spent most of the decade of the 1990’s in the northeastern city of Changchun, where I was the director of a program for Americans who were studying Chinese. Our program was a joint venture with a...
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