Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

If you regularly scroll through Instagram, it’s almost impossible not to know that we’re in peony season. Explosions of pink and white and purple appear in post after post, everyone trying to find the best shot before the petals suddenly drop off and we’re once again peony-less until next spring. Maybe it was due to this repeated exposure that I decided I wanted to see some peonies in person for myself; though I’ve often thought I should visit the University of Michigan’s peony garden, I’ve always missed the bloom for one reason or another. This year, however, the Arboretum’s social media staff did a particularly good job of alerting followers to every stage of the blooming process, so when they said that the garden was at 90% of its peak late last week, I knew it was time to act.

I wasn’t the only one—my first trip over to “the Arb” last night was brief, as I found the peony beds surrounded by people and pets and photographers. (I had waited until 6pm to leave my house, thinking that there might be fewer visitors later in the day; no such luck.) Everyone was very nice and careful to move out of each other’s way, but I still felt so distracted by the crowd that it was like I couldn’t even see the flowers in front of me. After only 10 or 15 minutes I bailed and went for a walk in another park.

I tried again this morning, arriving around 7:30 to find only a scattering of intense flower-focused photographers training their DSLR lenses on the peonies. This time I could really take it all in and notice the differences in structures from one variety to the next: how some stems hold only a handful of petals, while others droop under the weight of their “bomb” blossoms; the many different shades of white possible when tinged with either yellow or pink; the uniqueness of one fuchsia style, filled in its center with squiggly yellow petals that reminded me of a sea anemone. While I enjoy flowers quite a lot, I’m not all that knowledgeable about them—if I didn’t know that everything before me was a peony, I wouldn’t have realized that I was seeing many different varieties of the same flower.

The peonies were definitely worth a second trip. I’m glad I finally managed to catch them and learn that the excitement over their bloom is more than well-deserved.

Recent Goodreads Reviews

Recommendations

China Stories

James T. Areddy, “Political Dissident or $1 Billion Fraudster? A Chinese Tycoon Heads to Trial”
The Economist, “How Chinese networks clean dirty money on a vast scale”

Reading Wang’s new book was humbling for me. I lived in China during the booming first decade of this century, covering it for the New York Times, and I’ve continued to visit the country, write books about it, and read innumerable works on its affairs, often reviewing them. Yet China’s Age of Abundance astounded me—not least for this argument, made indirectly in the book but stated squarely in a recent public talk that Wang gave at my university, Columbia: China’s economic takeoff since Mao Zedong died in 1976 is an event of human importance that deserves consideration alongside the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most impactful phenomena of the past millennium.

Howard W. French, “What Produced the China Miracle?” — review of China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath, by UC Irvine sociologist Wang Feng

Isaac Kardon and Jennifer Kavanagh, “How China Will Squeeze, Not Seize, Taiwan”
Kaiser Kuo, “Ed Lanfranco: from Hoarder to Historian”
Katrina Northrop, “Daniel Mattingly on Xi Jinping’s Cultivation of the PLA”
David Ownby, “How China’s New Left Embraced the State”
John Ruwitch, “A Song for Grief in China”
Alexandra Stevenson, “China Has a Plan for Its Housing Crisis. Here’s Why It’s Not Enough.”

The root of the problem is the Communist Party’s excessive control of the economy, but that’s not going to change. It is baked into China’s political system and has only worsened during President Xi Jinping’s decade in power. New strategies for fixing the economy always rely on counterproductive mandates set by the government: Create new companies, build more industrial capacity. The strategy that most economists actually recommend to drive growth — freeing up the private sector and empowering Chinese consumers to spend more — would mean overhauling the way the government works, and that is unacceptable.

Anne Stevenson-Yang, “China’s Dead-End Economy Is Bad News for Everyone”

Henry Szadziewski, “A Record of Old Kashgar”
Vivian Wang, “Xi Jinping’s Recipe for Total Control: An Army of Eyes and Ears”
Vivian Wang and Siyi Zhao, “This ‘Russian Woman’ Loves China. Too Bad She’s a Deepfake.”
Stu Woo, “Chat Xi PT? China’s Chatbot Makes Sure It’s a Good Comrade”
Wu Haiyun, “A Century Later, China’s First Female Architect Gets Her Due”

Wanderings Around the World

Laura Ansley, “Are You Sitting Up Straight? America’s Obsession with Improving Posture”
Carey Baraka, “Nairobi to New York and back: the loneliness of the internationally educated elite”

Interviews with political figures, experts, and activists revealed a sustained campaign where Narendra Modi’s government threatens American citizens and permanent residents who dare speak out on the declining state of the country’s democracy. This campaign has not been described publicly until now because many people in the community  — even prominent ones — are too afraid to talk about it.

Zack Beauchamp, “‘Everyone is absolutely terrified’: Inside a US ally’s secret war on its American critics”

Kathryn Carpenter, “Our Local Monster” — review of Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster, by Eric A. Cheezum
Isabel Coles, with photographs by Svet Jacqueline, “A Shortage of Men Is Pushing Women Into Ukraine’s Mines”
Julia Cho, “My Secret to Creative Rejuvenation? Conferences.”
Amitava Kumar, “Sinking Town”
Shan Li and Rajesh Roy, “Braving Deserts, Seas and Snakes: What It Takes to Pull Off World’s Biggest Election”

Human interaction with whales in the Pacific provides a particularly vivid example of the way in which new areas are made and unmade; and its distinctive geography uncovers aspects of history which more familiar mental maps often obscure. Whaling voyages linked places that seem remote from one another and peripheral from the vantage point of national politics. They spanned the Pacific both from east to west and from north to south, and in the process, they confute our oddly pervasive tendency to colour our images of the Pacific in tropical hues, seeing it as a place “dominated by the colour blue” and “overwhelmingly fringed with leaning palm trees and coral reefs.” The Pacific of whales and whaling is an ocean of ferocious gales, dense fogs and drifting ice-floes, as much as it is a seascape of palms and coral.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “In the Wake of the Whale: Towards a Liquid Area History of the Pacific”

Diane Orson and Frank Mitchell, “Unforgotten: Connecticut’s Hidden History of Slavery”
Laura Sullivan and Nick McMillan, “Historical markers are everywhere in America. Some get history wrong”
Louisa Thomas, “The Kafkaesque Journey of the Oakland A’s”
Paige Williams, “Not Your Childhood Library”

Standout Story

Before leaving Hong Kong two years ago for a fellowship in the U.S., Rowena He shredded the work of her students and wiped the hard drive on her computer. The prominent scholar of China’s bloody 1989 crackdown on democracy protests in Tiananmen Square said she feared she could be arrested and forced to turn over their work. “It’s so brutal and cruel to have to burn your students’ papers, to erase everything in my computer,” He said in a recent interview. “My job is to document history, but personally, I have nothing to hold on to.”

Elaine Yu, “She Devoted Herself to Teaching About the Tiananmen Massacre. Hong Kong Shunned Her.”

Featured photo: Peonies, W.E. Upjohn Peony Garden at Nichols Arboretum, May 25-26, 2024.