Category: Writing
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Weekly Wanderings: November 3, 2025
November. The penultimate month of a year that has often felt endless and yet flown by. November always seems like a month that people want to rush through, eager to get to the December holidays and end-of-year celebrations. Christmas commercials are playing regularly on TV now; one of the radio stations I usually listen to…
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Wall Street Journal: “Twins Torn Apart”
I’ve just published a new book review at the Wall Street Journal, about Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins, by journalist Barbara Demick: “You’re not allowed to keep this child,” a Family Planning official informed Xiuhua. Another man held her wailing 21-month-old niece,…
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Weekly Wanderings: March 23, 2025
Good morning from Chicago, where I’m at least 50% less frazzled and 150% more rested than I was when I last sat down to write a post intro. My brother and I have spent several days walking around the city, taking tours, and eating one good meal after another. Our hotel is in Little Italy,…
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Weekly Wanderings: December 1, 2024
December! Well, Decem-brrrr here in Michigan … it was 19 degrees outside and snowing lightly when I woke up this morning. In addition to the links below, I have a new piece just up at the Los Angeles Review of Books: The creation of character input methods, and how thinking about them has changed our…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 13, 2024
What a week. I try to think of everything that’s happened around the world in the past seven days and it feels like a grim verse from “We Didn’t Start the Fire (2024 Version).” I can barely keep up with the news, let alone read in-depth stories about it. And, in some ways, I just…
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Weekly Wanderings: July 15, 2024
No note from me up top this week because (a) What a wild weekend we’ve just had in the United States, and (b) I flew back from Indonesia on Friday-Saturday so my brain is nothing but mush at the moment. I do have a new piece of writing to share. The Wall Street Journal has…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 14, 2024
On Friday I published a reading round-up previewing Taiwan’s presidential election, which took place yesterday. Lai Ching-te (William Lai), Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate and current vice-president, came away as the winner, securing more than 40 percent of the vote. While the DPP will now hold the presidency for a third consecutive term, it lost…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 7, 2024
I was among a trio of authors who contributed reviews of Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War, a family memoir by Zhuqing Li, to the Education About Asia journal’s Spring 2023 issue. My review appeared in print then, and is now available to read online with no paywall:…
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Weekly Wanderings: June 24, 2023
Lots of self-promotion and work talk this week, but sometimes a bunch of things come together at once … Greetings from Daegu, Korea, where I’m working at the 2023 AAS-in-Asia conference, co-hosted by the Association for Asian Studies (my employer) and Kyungpook National University. For the past few months, every time I told someone from…
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Three Tips for Nonfiction Authors
In the space of only a few days, Michigan’s fall has gone from “crisp, sparkling, riot of color” to “gray, raw, endless rain,” meaning that we’ve now entered the season of meeting people for long afternoon talks in cozy coffee shops. That’s exactly what China media scholar Aynne Kokas and I did Wednesday afternoon, chatting…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 