Author: mauracunningham
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LA Review of Books China Blog: Let 100 Voices Speak
My latest LA Review of Books China Blog post went up on the site last week, but I was away on a work trip and didn’t have time to link to it until now. In the post, I interview Liz Carter, a Washington, D.C.-based translator and author of Let 100 Voices Speak: How the Internet…
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Snapshots from a Sojourn in Kansas
“Are you dining alone, honey?” the waitress at Arthur Bryant’s BBQ asked me, surveying my table, three of its four seats empty, with a dismayed glance. Arthur Bryant’s, I had realized, is not a place where people eat solo. The tables around me were filled with families enjoying a Sunday afternoon barbecue lunch, plates stacked…
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Road Show
On Monday, October 5, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (the organization where I work) will be staging its 9th annual CHINA Town Hall, a national day of programming that will take place in nearly 80 venues across the United States and beyond this year. I’ll be traveling to Manhattan, KS to speak at Kansas…
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LA Review of Books: The Spy Game’s Afoot
While I really enjoy television shows that tell spy stories (Alias, Chuck, The Americans), I very rarely read spy novels. They tend, I’ve found, to be long and tedious: covert action that can be carried out fairly quickly and clearly on screen often takes many pages to describe in print. But I’ve thoroughly enjoyed two spy novels…
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The Hot Spots and Storied Plots of Laurel Hill Cemetery
“The Cemetery Gift Shop Is Open” wasn’t the first thing I expected to see as my mother, brother, and I approached the main office at Laurel Hill Cemetery last Saturday morning. A gift shop at a cemetery? But indeed, we walked into the room and found a small store selling books and postcards of historic…
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Up, Up, and Away: Yangshuo, 2005
Like many other things I did during my first trip to China, the hot-air balloon ride wasn’t my idea. I had gone on what was meant to be a two-week tour of Hong Kong and southern China with Elaine (not her real name), an American classmate of mine from Beijing. After several days in Hong…
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China: Through the Looking Glass
When I worked at a hospital during college, I had a co-worker whom I will call Mike. Mike was not Asian, but he had two Chinese characters tattooed on his arm. Whenever someone asked what they meant, Mike responded “mysterious,” which I’m pretty sure he meant in the film noir-ish sense of “handsome, mysterious, and…
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Nightscape at Longwood Gardens
I’ve written here before about how much I love suburban Philadelphia’s Longwood Gardens: the park is beautiful, it’s elegant, it’s timeless. My grandparents took my mother and her sisters there, just as my mother took my brother and me there when we were little, and while some elements changed in little ways over the decades,…
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LA Review of Books: There Be Dragons
I have said here previously how much I enjoyed Dragon Day, the final volume in Lisa Brackmann’s Ellie McEnroe crime thriller trilogy. This week at the LA Review of Books China Blog, I review the book in more detail: Dragon Day sees Ellie attempting to stay in the good graces of her biggest — and scariest —…
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Getting Things Done: Knitting Box Edition
Last Saturday, I looked in my knitting box and realized two things: (1) the same three projects had been sitting in it for at least six months, and (2) all three were thisclose to being finished. If I just sat down and did the simple work that each needed (but which I’d been putting off…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 