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Winter in Beijing
China had just celebrated Chunjie, or the Spring Festival—otherwise known as Chinese New Year—when I arrived in Beijing in mid-February 2005, but spring felt very far away. Since Beijing and Philadelphia are at practically the same latitude, I hadn’t expected the winter weather to be anything I couldn’t handle. I’d packed a ski jacket, gloves,…
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Lights! Camera! Flowers!
My mother and I celebrated her birthday a month early with a trip to the Philadelphia Flower Show on Saturday afternoon. This year’s Flower Show theme is “Celebrate the Movies,” so the entrance is done up as a movie premiere, with a marquee and red carpet—and the smell of popcorn wafting through the air. Disney…
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Ten Years Ago In China
One of the side effects of finally moving into a (hopefully) semi-permanent living situation is that I can finally reclaim the random boxes of my belongings that have accumulated in my parents’ basement over the past decade. In unpacking one of those boxes, I found that it contained souvenirs from my first trip to China—a…
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Bookshelf: Midnight in Siberia
For me, a ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway would be an interesting vacation, and one I’ve long wanted to take. For Russians in the past, Trans-Siberian trains carried people away from their homes into exile. But for millions of Russians today, the Trans-Siberian is simply a mode of transport—the most cost-effective way to get from Point…
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LA Review of Books: Q&A with Michael Meyer, Author of In Manchuria
Now up at the LA Review of Books China Blog, my interview with Michael Meyer, author of a wonderful new travelogue/history/memoir about life in China’s Northeast called In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China: MEC: You write that you first voiced the idea of moving from Beijing to Wasteland “after…
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Suitable for Framing
Look what finally arrived! It wasn’t just a dream … I really am done. Now, tell me more about these “rights and privileges.”
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My New York Napkin Collection
At first I wanted the napkins. Anyone who has eaten a few meals at mid- or lower-end restaurants in China knows that getting table napkins can require the persistence and negotiating skills of a senior diplomat. You’d think the waitstaff were personally paying for each napkin out of their own paychecks (wait, maybe they are?)…
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Magic-Loop Mittens, Knit Without Fear
I promise, I will not turn this site into a knitting blog. I actually have at least half a dozen other posts in rough draft form—book reviews! photographs! China stuff!—and need to clean those up and publish them. But first, one last post (for now) about knitting. My favorite knitting blogger is Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, known…
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Gone Grant: UC Pacific Rim Research Program Ends
I have a very clear memory of finding out that I’d been awarded a UC Pacific Rim Research Grant, because I thought I’d been rejected. I was kind of on a break from grad school in the spring of 2012, working on ChinaFile at the Asia Society and living in Princeton. As I rode the…
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Knitters Take Manhattan: Vogue Knitting Live! NYC
(Random side note: although I loved both of my apartments in Shanghai, one thing neither ever offered was quiet, primarily due to the incessant renovations other residents were always undertaking. It just struck me how wonderful it is to sit down with my coffee and laptop early on a Sunday morning and write without the…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 