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Bookshelf: Charity and Sylvia by Rachel Hope Cleves
As a historian and a reader, my favorite “relaxation” books are the ones that spotlight unknown or unusual personal stories that complicate what we think we know about the past. Sure, I’ll read an analysis of the origins of the Boxer Uprising or a monograph on everyday life in twentieth-century Shanghai—and both of those books…
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A Weekend in Pingyao, Part II: A Journey of Ten Thousand Steps
Pingyao’s most notable feature is its centuries-old city wall, which stands ten meters high, a fortress of sloping brick—brown in some lights, gray in others—topped with crenellations through which cannons could be shot if the city needed to defend itself. The six-kilometer-long wall would form a square, if not for its squiggly southern edge. Six…
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A Weekend in Pingyao, Part I: A Journey of a Thousand Miles
It seemed like half the people on my flight from Shanghai to Taiyuan were coughing—short, dry testimonies to the coal city’s infamy as one of the most polluted places in China. Taiyuan deserves that reputation, I saw as I rode a bus from the airport to the train station: a thick yellow haze hung in…
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LA Review of Books: Take Me Out to the Ballgame, in Taipei
Golf on Monday, baseball today … based on what I’ve been writing lately, I probably seem like more of a sports fan than I actually am. Just a coincidence, though. Well, not completely. I am a huge baseball fan and don’t get to indulge this passion when I’m here in Shanghai. That’s one of the…
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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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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 