Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Happy August, and thanks for reading.

Recommendations

China Stories

James T. Areddy and Chun Han Wong, “Kamala Harris’s Record Offers Only Hints of a China Worldview”

Migratory grief stems from the losses experienced when one moves away from home. These span both the physical and the intangible, which makes the grief a complicated process. The Hong Kongers I interviewed spoke of the loss of shared experiences with friends, the loss of cultural traditions, the loss of a way of life, and the loss of not only the past, but hope for the future.

— Ai-Men Lau, “‘Reminders of home felt like small catastrophes’”

Kanis Leung, “Hong Kong young people struggle to rebuild their lives after being jailed under Beijing’s crackdown”

Adam Minter, “Egyptian Factories, Sichuan Schools, and the Unfilled Promises of Globalization”

Christian Shepherd and Vic Chiang, “Taiwan is readying citizens for a Chinese invasion. It’s not going well.”

Vivian Wang, “Why Chinese Propaganda Loves Foreign Travel Bloggers”

Yan Zhuang, “Why Some Young People in China Pretend to Be Birds” (last year the trend was “zombie-style”)

Wanderings Around the World

Even if she goes no further, Janjaem said, boxing has already saved her. Now 24, she has bought land and gold for her parents and a pickup truck for herself. She scored an athletic scholarship to a university. Her older brother, by contrast, left school at 15 to work with their father, a truck driver.

— Hannah Beech and Muktita Suhartono, with photographs by Lauren DeCicca, “The Thai Women Punching Their Way Out of Poverty”

Shoaib Daniyal, “‘Fear of Hasina gone’: How the student agitation has shaken up Bangladesh’s authoritarianism”

Georgi Kantchev, “Russia Isn’t at the Olympics—and Russians Can’t Stop Watching”

Constant Méheut and Daria Mitiuk, with photographs by Oksana Parafeniuk, “War Shatters Dating Scene for Women in Ukraine”

I have waited four hundred and ninety-one days to write this piece. On Thursday, after a year and a half in Russian jail, my friend Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was freed, along with fifteen other prisoners, in a multinational prisoner exchange with Russia, which received eight prisoners in return. It was the largest such deal since the end of the Cold War, and likely the first to include political dissidents since 1986, when Natan Sharansky, a Soviet human-rights activist who later became an Israeli politician, was freed on the Glienicke Bridge, connecting East and West Germany.

— Joshua Yaffa, “Evan Gershkovich Is Finally Coming Home”

Standout Stories

But for certain things, like capturing the texture of daily life, there was no substitute for being in China. In that respect, we had entered the age of the sideline sinologists: the experts who hadn’t lived in China for years and in some cases couldn’t return at all. As one of the few foreign writers reporting from the country, the sense of isolation was profound. It often felt like standing alone at midcourt in a game in which virtually every other potential player has been transformed into a grumpy and hyper-critical color commentator.

— Peter Hessler, “Sideline Sinology”

---

The Russian Federation had a few final items of protocol to tick through with the man who had become its most famous prisoner. One, he would be allowed to leave with the papers he’d penned in detention, the letters he’d scrawled out and the makings of a book he’d labored over. But first, they had another piece of writing they required from him, an official request for presidential clemency. The text, moreover, should be addressed to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.  The pro forma printout included a long blank space the prisoner could fill out if desired, or simply, as expected, leave blank. In the formal high Russian he had honed over 16 months imprisonment, the Journal’s Russia correspondent filled the page. The last line submitted a proposal of his own: After his release, would Putin be willing to sit down for an interview?

— Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Bojan Pancevski, and Aruna Viswanatha, “Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich”

Featured photo: Island Park, Ann Arbor, MI, June 7, 2024.