My mom (aka “Gracie”) turned 90 on April 22. To help her celebrate the big occasion, my sister and I launched a campaign for her to receive 90 birthday cards. By the end of the day on the 22nd, she had received 136!!! We had a lovely brunch with family and a few friends on…
Month: April 2017
The Chinese Student Bubble
The numbers are impressive: there are now more than 328,000 Chinese students in universities across the United States. When the first wave of students came in the 1980’s, they were mostly visiting scholars (professors). Now the students coming are undergrads, and in many cases high school students. What is it like for Chinese students on…
Casting a Bell
Each time I discovered an old bell in China, I found myself wondering “how in the world did it get here?” They were, after all, from the United States, Russia, France, and Germany. I didn’t give much thought to how the giant bells were made. So when I ran across this video recently, I was dumbfounded….
Casting a Bell
In my book The Bells Are Not Silent, I write about the origin of the use of bells in the church: Catholic tradition has it that the first time bells would have been heard in a church was in the Roman city of Nola, near modern-day Naples. Saint Paulinas, the Bishop of Nola, initially used…