Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

At 4:00pm this past Friday, I shut down the computer in my office at the Association for Asian Studies and officially started a month-long sabbatical.

I like my job very much—I’m fortunate to have found a position that keeps me tied in to academia while also devoting my days to reading, writing, and editing. After eight years, however, I wanted a longer break from the day in, day out rhythms of office life, and I was able to save up my vacation time to use (with our Executive Director’s blessing) on a full four weeks off.

My first instinct—not surprisingly, if you’ve followed me for any length of time—was to spend my sabbatical traveling. I could do a big road trip! I began looking at Google Maps and considering the baseball games I could attend, museums I could tour, and National Parks I could visit. Soon, I had a three-week tour of the Upper Midwest and Great Plains sketched out.

And then, I surprised myself with the sudden realization that my carefully crafted itinerary didn’t look like much fun. It looked … busy. I’d replace my daily commute to the office and sequence of meetings, tasks, and emails with hours on the highway, nights in ever-changing hotels, and a vacation schedule that was almost certainly too ambitious. And in the meantime, all those dumb little chores at home that I always plan to take care of one night after work but never do would remain undone: junk drawer stuffed full of detritus, basement cluttered with things that just need to be put in their place, that high transom window in the living room still in need of a good cleaning.

So I scrapped my extended road trip and decided instead on a balanced sabbatical: one week at home, ten days in Montana and Yellowstone National Park, followed by a final week and a half back at home. I’ll still get to travel and see somewhere new, but I’ll also have time for longer, more focused periods of reading, writing, walking, cleaning, cooking, etc. than I can usually manage.

Here’s to taking a break, whatever that looks like for you.

Thanks for reading.

New #AsiaNow Author Interview

Before I went on sabbatical, I published the latest in my series of author interviews at the AAS #AsiaNow blog. I had the humbling experience of reading Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos, by historian Ryan Wolfson-Ford, and realizing that I know only the barest of basic facts about Laos. Wolfson-Ford’s intellectual history of post-colonial Laos is a forceful argument against scholarship on the country that positions it as a puppet of the United States; you’ll get a glimpse of the passion he feels on this topic from reading our discussion about the book.

Recommendations

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Yangyang Cheng, “Where the River Reaches Home”

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Amy Hawkins, “‘Monument to history’ battle between US and China over future of Mao’s secretary’s diary”

Ryan Ho Kilpatrick, “Decline and Fall” — summary of findings from a new survey of press freedom in Hong Kong

Ian Johnson, “A Chinese Memoirist’s Exile in Las Vegas”

Tiffany May, “A History Museum Shows How China Wants to Remake Hong Kong”

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— Andrew Stokols, “Xiong’an: the City as Showroom”

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Amy Elliott Bragg, “The baseball star on the sidelines of Michigan’s first big Civil Rights case”

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Constant Méheut and Daria Mitiuk, “Battle-Hardened Poets Fuel a Literary Revival in Ukraine”

Hazel Pfeifer, “How Uzbekistan’s young generation is changing the face of its creative economy”

Featured photo: Twiggy the Water-Skiing Squirrel performing at the Genesee (MI) County Fair, August 24, 2024.