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LA Review of Books: Driving Toward the Chinese Dream
How to get me to pick up a book about golf: make it about golf in China. At the LA Review of Books main page, I have a review of The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, an excellent new book by Dan Washburn (who used to work down the hall from me at…
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Look Like a Shanghai Girl in Six Easy Surgeries
Go into any antique market here in Shanghai and you’ll find plenty of reproduction posters featuring the famous “Shanghai Girls” of the 1920s and ’30s. These were calendars and advertisements for products like alcohol, cigarettes, soap, and so forth that featured qipao-wearing beauties with pale skin, pinned-back wavy hair, and a gentle demeanor. The Shanghai…
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Cai Guo-Qiang: The Ninth Wave
One of the things that I have not done nearly enough of during my almost two years (!) in Shanghai is go to the many art shows that pass through the city. I often intend to and then don’t make it, or only hear about them when there are two days left and it’s a…
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GradHacker: My Dissertation Sweater
“If your dissertation were an object, what would it be?” As I write in my first GradHacker post, published today, I had to answer this question a couple of years ago when I attended a summer school at Heidelberg University (ah, Heidelberg). I replied that my dissertation was a hand-knit sweater, which turned out to…
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LA Review of Books: China’s Forgotten World War II
I wound up doing a sort of sequel to my China’s Forgotten WWI post for the LA Review of Books China Blog, this one looking at—no surprise here—China’s forgotten WWII. The new post is a Q&A with Oxford historian Rana Mitter, author of Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945. I’ve used this book a…
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False Finishes
So, I guess I’m done? Sort of? Maybe? Almost? It turns out that there’s an unexpected amount of ambiguity about when exactly one finishes a PhD. When I got my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, the graduation ceremony was the official point of completion. That’s not the case with a doctorate—especially if, as I did, you…
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Visualising China: On Child Poverty in China
For anyone who would prefer not to read the 225-page version of my dissertation (and who can blame you?), the 500-word version is now up at the Visualising China blog. Visualising China is an online photo archive run by Professor Robert Bickers of the University of Bristol (who also wrote one of the China in…
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Twelve Years a Graduate Student? Yes, Twelve
“Oh, you’re still in school?” I don’t think any doctoral student can refrain from cringing at this question. Friends, relatives, and airplane seatmates unfamiliar with the PhD process don’t always understand how unbounded it can be: it takes as long as it takes to get through coursework, pass a set of rigorous qualifying exams, draw…
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Bookshelf: In Spite of the Gods
I have an on-again, off-again relationship with a book club here in Shanghai that’s loosely formed around some of the Johns Hopkins alumni in the city. I’ll go for a meeting or two, then skip several in a row because I’m busy or out of the country or don’t feel like reading the work of…
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Sanmao Saturday: Introducing Zhang Leping and His Sanmao the Orphan Comics
Way back when I was in my first year at UCI, I had to write a research paper and was struggling to find a topic. I knew that I wanted to do something on popular culture, but I only had about ten weeks to do all the research AND write the paper—no time to make…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 