I find cities and their role in modern global life entirely fascinating and extremely important, as I’ve written about many times. This is a really exciting story, reported in Business Insider: China is beginning a project, a giant eco-city that 80,000 people can live in, with greatly reduced water and electricity usage, less waste produced, [...]
When we think of languages, there is a tendency to see them as always having been there, as changing maybe slightly over time, but being unending mostly. English speakers tend to have an overly bold attitude about their language, even without consciously being aware of it. English dominates the modern, global world–on the internet, airports, [...]
Subtitle: An oral history project, incredible families, much talk on adoption, China, love, and family, and how I found a title for this project Last January, I was struck with an idea for a project. I had read a book about a generation of Chinese girls who had been adopted into families worldwide, with a [...]
“Yi Jie Xie, how do you keep your white skirt so white?” For some reason, I have never forgotten this sentence, uttered to me on a hot summer day in Yangzhou, after an afternoon watching Chinese students play table tennis against American students with quite sub-par abilities. We were walking back to our own dorms, [...]
I have been fascinated by Ai Weiwei, the 54-year-old provocative artist and voice of dissidence in China, since May, when I heard an interview with his English translator on one of the my favorite podcasts. He was detained and questioned and kept by the government for 81 days this year, after his blog incited uproar from citizens who agreed [...]
Peter Hessler, former English teacher in China and author of several books on Chinese life and people, both historical and modern, is a 2011 MacArthur Fellow and long-form journalist. In his interview in reception of his prize, he spoke on what it is to write about China and Chinese life, to him: “There’s always been [...]
Bill Saporito’s October 31 Time article said it best: “Consider the cosmic irony: wobbly Western economies are depending on the Chinese Communist Party to save their capitalist bacon. Likewise, the Chinese government’s grand scheme to rebalance its economy hinges on Western-style materialism.” “Shop ’til you drop” probably isn’t what Mao Zedong had in mind during the years [...]