Even though my dad has been gone for 13+ years now, I still miss him and think about him EVERY DAY, especially on Father’s Day! Here he is enjoying some delicious food at the Roast Meat Shop ( a Korean BBQ) in Changchun, 1994.
Push Push, Pull Pull
As anyone who’s lived in China can attest, getting things done can often be difficult — certainly more difficult than WE think it should be. But getting things done can also be difficult for Chinese people; they even have special term: tuotuo lala (拖拖拉拉), which is literally translated as “push push pull pull.” I had […]
The Corner of Stalin and Freedom
In the 1990’s I studied and worked at Northeast Normal University in Changchun, Jilin Province. We always got a chuckle out of the fact that the school was located on the corner of Stalin and Freedom. There wasn’t much on that corner — our university entrance, the Friendship Store, and some government offices. Today there […]
The Great Manchurian Christmas Scarf Incident
“Welcome to Qiqihar,” they said in one accord. “There’s been an outbreak of bubonic plague.” That ominous greeting notwithstanding, we were overjoyed to see our friends at the station in the middle of the night as we got off the train. We had spent the better part of 12 hours trundling across the Manchurian Plain, or […]
Of Tones and Trains
After standing in line for 2 hours to buy train tickets (yes, there was a line!), my classmate and I finally got to the window. The train schedule we had indicated there was an 8 pm train two days hence from Dalian to Changchun. Because we were still language students and so not entirely confident […]
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 university there, so I and the foreign students that I supervised all lived on a campus. One fall […]
