Category: Movies
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Weekly Wanderings: December 14, 2025
Two housekeeping notes to start: (1) If you’re in Clawson, Michigan, on Sunday, January 4, I’ll be the discussant for a talk by Joseph Torigian on his book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (read my write-up of the book from earlier this year). Tickets are free,…
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Weekly Wanderings: June 16, 2024
A few years ago I ate dinner at The Delft Bistro in Marquette, the largest city on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I could guess from the large marquee outside and the film-themed decor inside that the building had once been a movie theater, and that the restaurant’s owners had decided to pay homage to that history…
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Weekly Wanderings: March 31, 2024
Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates, and happy final day of March to anyone else who feels like this month has been extra-long. March is always weird for me because the AAS conference falls somewhere in its latter half, so I spend the first couple weeks preparing for that, speed through five high-adrenaline days on…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 12, 2024
新年快乐 and 恭喜发财 to one and all as we kick off the Year of the Dragon. At the Association for Asian Studies #AsiaNow blog, I have two new interviews with authors to share: And at Goodreads, I reviewed The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen, a compelling and beautifully written novel about the members of…
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Screen: Angels Wear White
Pouring cups of tea and speaking in the practiced staccato common to tour guides and salespeople across China, a young woman wearing a nurse’s uniform outlines the advantages of hymen-reconstruction surgery. Lily, a newly single hotel receptionist in her early twenties, listens nervously. The nurse ends her pitch with the assurance that Lily will find…
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Weekly Wanderings: Still Wrapping Up 2018 Edition
■ I have a minor flurry (a squall?) of new pieces to share this week, as several things I wrote in late 2018 got published all at once: At Dissent Magazine (subscribe!), I have a long review essay about new books by Carl Minzner (End of an Era) and Elizabeth Economy (The Third Revolution) that…
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Weekly Wanderings: Heavy and Light Edition
This has been a very weird week for me: although I’ve been surrounded by a bright and cheery Michigan summer filled with fun things to do, I’ve also been preoccupied with the many dark and dispiriting news stories surrounding the death of Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died on Thursday while still serving an…
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Screen: I Am Not Madame Bovary
Confession: I don’t often go out of my way to watch Chinese movies because I generally can’t relax and enjoy them. I don’t watch them as movies; I scrutinize them as texts. Questions fill my mind as I stare at the screen: What does this film say about Chinese society? What image of the country…
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Weekly Wanderings: Failure and Success Edition
I’ve made the executive decision (because it’s my blog and therefore I’m the executive) to abandon the pretense that these “Weekly Wanderings” posts are always going to be published on Fridays, because the past month has shown me I can only manage that 50% of the time. So now my goal is to get them…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 30, 2016
▪ As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge Ghostbusters fan; were it not for the condo regulations in my development, I’d definitely have a 13-foot-high inflatable Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man on my front lawn for the next month. My brother assures me that my still furniture-free living room is large enough to accommodate him, but I…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 