Category: China
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Postcard from Hong Kong
United Airlines flight 117 begins at Newark Liberty International Airport, 10 miles from my home in Jersey City, and ends in Hong Kong, 8065 miles away. It’s the eighth-longest flight route in operation, and if you’re a restless flyer—and I am a terribly restless flyer—there’s nothing good about it, save the small cup of mango…
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Reading Rainbow
Between commuting to work (about 45 minutes each way on mass transit) and traveling (greetings from Orange County, CA!), I have been plowing through books at a prodigious rate these past few months. I often read two to four books a week, making repeated trips to the New York Public Library branch close to my…
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4/30, New York: Women’s Rights Activism in China Today
On April 30, I’ll be the guest speaker at an after-work gathering of China Hands NYC, talking about the topic of women’s rights activism in China today. The jumping-off point for my talk will be, obviously, the five feminists who were detained in China just before International Women’s Day last month and finally released earlier…
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Two Upcoming Events in SoCal
I will be back in California for a week at the end of this month—first to San Francisco for work, then to Irvine for … well, a working vacation? I originally intended my three days in Southern California to be pure vacation—visiting friends, going to the beach, eating my annual In-N-Out burger. But then I…
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The Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Past and Present
I spent last weekend in Chicago attending the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS, shorthand for both the association and the annual meeting). On the night before I left for the conference, my boss handed me something she had found in her office—the program for the 1971 AAS. Promising to treat it…
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LA Review of Books China Blog: “Inconvenient Truths”
I have a new post up at the LA Review of Books China Blog, about two documentaries that were recently censored in China and India: It’s not every week that China-and-India-watchers have parallel stories to chew over, but that’s what’s been happening for the last few days. In both countries, a documentary film about an…
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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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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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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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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?)…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 