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A Short Interlude in Swampy Shanghai
After five days of enjoying the beautiful Beijing spring, I headed out to the airport one evening and boarded a flight to Shanghai. As I stood on the tarmac waiting to ascend the plane’s steps, I looked around and thought to myself how absolutely perfect the weather was. Two hours later, I de-planed into the…
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Beijing: Brilliant and Beautiful
I’ve just returned from a three-week work trip to Mainland China and Taiwan, which involved visits to six cities and twenty-two days of hotel breakfast buffets. (I was rather surprised when I woke up in New Jersey this morning and my only choices were oatmeal with peanut butter or toast with peanut butter—and that I’d…
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Bookshelf: All the Single Ladies
By the time I finished reading the introduction to journalist Rebecca Traister’s new tour de force, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, I had highlighted so much that I started to wonder if highlighting was a meaningless activity. Every paragraph offered something I wanted to remember and return…
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The Diplomat — “The Currency Question: Andrew Jackson and Chairman Mao”
Later this year, Jeff Wasserstrom and I are going to collaborate on a third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know*, so we’ve started making notes on parts of the book that will need updating. With this week’s announcement that Andrew Jackson will no longer be the face of the…
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La La Land
I swear, I didn’t fly all the way to Los Angeles just to get my photo taken with the Property Brothers. It was a bonus. I did go to LA for a couple of meetings, which I deliberately scheduled around the LA Times Festival of Books. I wasn’t completely thrilled that this meant cross-country trips on…
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#AAS2016 and Seattle
I’ve recently returned from the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), which was held in Seattle this year. AAS is my favorite academic conference—it tends to have really strong panels and offers many opportunities to see my friends in the profession—and I enjoy it even more when I can combine it…
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Bookshelf — Knitlandia, by Clara Parkes
I read a lot of books about knitting, and a lot of books about travel, but I’ve never read a travel book about knitting before. There’s a reason for that, as Amazon tells me that this might be a genre with precisely one title in it: Knitlandia: A Knitter Sees the World, recently published by…
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Two Wurms and a Bird
During that freezing winter in Beijing back in 2005, I became a fan of the knit earflap hat: there was simply no better way to stay warm outside than to keep my head nearly encased in wool and Polarfleece lining. I’ve had several earflap hats over the years, and while they’ve all looked ridiculous on…
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Five Photos from China in 2005
Mid-February always makes me think of my first trip to China, which began when my plane landed in Beijing late at night on February 16, 2005. As I wrote last year, the six months that followed were simultaneously exhilarating and challenging: as much as I loved living on my own and getting to know a…
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Romance in Hong Kong, Both Light and Dark
When thinking about the world’s most romantic cities, Paris and New York probably leap to mind—they are, after all, familiar settings for romantic comedies and novels. But a new book and movie, both released this weekend in tandem with Valentine’s Day, use Hong Kong as the backdrop for their love stories and prove that the…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 