Articles tagged with 'china' — 16 found
Pinyin, created
Zhou Youguang, creator of modern pinyin, Romanized Chinese as we know it. Photo by Shiho Fukada. 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, [...]
April 5th, 2012My life is richer, simply because I asked
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 [...]
February 29th, 2012Being Yi Jie Xie
Calligraphy practice, the characters of my name “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 [...]
February 20th, 2012Ai Weiwei: A game of chess and China’s elemental flaw
Ai Weiwei’s self portrait for the Time Person of the Year issue 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 [...]
December 26th, 2011On people, or: “I didn’t want to start with an issue”
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 [...]
November 26th, 2011If the Chinese middle class permits
The expanding Chinese middle class has more money to spend on tourism, like this family in Nanjing, June 2007. 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 [...]
November 14th, 2011Oral history in practice: find the people, and a project becomes real
Lots of kiddos at Best International School in Zhengzhou, China, May 2007 I’ve started putting into practice the things that up until this point in my oral history class have only been discussed, that existed only in theory, as things we would eventually have to do. I’ve begun the process of cold-calling a list of [...]
October 5th, 2011Tell it right, and a western can make me cry.
I have always been a sucker for a good story. The simplest tale, told in the right way, brings me to tears. It is almost silly how often I have found myself sitting in the movie theater at the end of a great film, or even a mediocre one, and suddenly, some small trigger in the narrative, [...]
June 23rd, 2011Instead of reading for class…
… I’ve been reading a good old travelogue, like those which sustained my interest for a few years, when I first discovered the Travel Essays section of the bookstore, until I realized that mostly, that shelf does not have new releases very often, and I had read all the best ones already. The rest, I [...]
June 12th, 2011Life lessons, from Cuba
Habana vintage For two weeks, I saw not a single advertisement for a corporation, not a company’s name at all, unless it was under the command of the Cuban government. It is the exact opposite of the shock of those pictures of random Hong Kong or Shanghai alleyways, that flash thousands of signs, brand names, [...]
May 30th, 2011