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 university there, so I and the foreign students that I supervised all lived on a campus. One fall…
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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 Beijing neighborhood. “I wonder if I can figure out where the photo is taken,” I said to…
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 stirred up the masses, which forced the government to declare that there was no leak; the…
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 miles northwest of Beijing. She would remain there for five years. Life in the camp was brutal, but security was lax enough…
Literary 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 as that one year in China has turned into a 28 year sojourn, so…
Chinese 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" was how The Chairman used to describe the relationship), but unofficially it's the unpredictable neighbor who's insane enough to…