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Wanderings: Two Weeks in Taiwan
I’ll begin by admitting that I was wrong. I know a lot of people who have spent significant amounts of time in Taiwan—studying Chinese or doing archival research—and without fail, they tell me that they prefer Taiwan to mainland China. It’s cleaner, it’s better organized and better run and easier to get things done, the…
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Time for a New Look
Scroll down for photos of my new purple hair, nose piercing, and panda tattoo! Just kidding. I’m not the one with a new look—though I could probably use a haircut—this website is. I decided to take some time today and finally make a few changes I’d been planning for a while. Major aspects of this…
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Wall Street Journal: Denying Historians: China’s Archives Increasingly Off-Bounds
Before I came to China to do research for the first time, I worried about how I would get access to the archives. I had heard plenty of war stories from historians who had done their dissertation research in the 1980s and early ’90s, when the archives had been opened to foreigners (unlike the Mao…
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Writing, New and Old
No blogging here recently because I am in full-on DISSERTATION MODE as I careen down the home stretch. Ten days to go before I have to deliver the finished product to my committee—I’ll make it (I hope!), but working full-bore on the final chapter and editing the ones I’ve already written hasn’t left me with…
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The Billfold: The Cost of Living in Shanghai
I’m a loyal reader of The Billfold, which describes itself as simply “a site about money.” There’s some personal finance stuff—how to save for retirement, why you should know your credit score, what goes in to buying a house, etc.—but most of the articles are less predictable, and some are downright quirky (last week they…
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LA Review of Books: City of Reinvention
I took a short break from the LA Review of Books China Blog this spring, as I had conferences to attend and a dissertation to write, but I’m back now and returning to my schedule of posting there once every month or so. My latest post, a review of Amy Tan’s recent novel The Valley…
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Bookshelf: And the City Swallowed Them
Late one night in July 2008, a 22-year-old Canadian model named Diana O’Brien died in the stairwell of her Shanghai apartment building after being stabbed more than 20 times. O’Brien’s assailant was Chen Jun, an 18-year-old migrant worker from impoverished Anhui Province. Like O’Brien, Chen had traveled to Shanghai without proper papers, hoping to wedge…
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Never Apologize for Reading What You Like: Or, the Lesson I’ve Learned from Jennifer Weiner’s Books
I have never been ahead of trends. I always hear about good television shows when they’re well into their second or third seasons; I mainly buy clothes when they’re on the clearance rack, meaning that they’re already out of style; I did not start eating kale, quinoa, or polenta until they showed up a Trader…
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From Sea to Shining Sea—By Train
For a cross-country trip, taking the train doesn’t make much sense. It’s far slower than flying, and more expensive to boot. But my mother and I both love riding trains and have been talking about doing a big trip for years, so we finally decided that last week’s graduation in Southern California provided the perfect…
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Doctor for a Day
When I was nine or ten years old, my mother introduced me to the Sue Barton books that she remembered from her childhood. The books are a midcentury pulp series that follow the education and career of Sue Barton, the world’s most competent and most good-humored nurse (and a redhead!). I devoured all the books—multiple…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 