Category: Writing
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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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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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Visualising China: On Child Poverty in China
For anyone who would prefer not to read the 225-page version of my dissertation (and who can blame you?), the 500-word version is now up at the Visualising China blog. Visualising China is an online photo archive run by Professor Robert Bickers of the University of Bristol (who also wrote one of the China in…
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Sanmao Saturday: Introducing Zhang Leping and His Sanmao the Orphan Comics
Way back when I was in my first year at UCI, I had to write a research paper and was struggling to find a topic. I knew that I wanted to do something on popular culture, but I only had about ten weeks to do all the research AND write the paper—no time to make…
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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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At Least I’m a Productive Procrastinator
You would not believe how many people have sent this comic my way lately: Apparently, there’s a vicious rumor circulating that I’m a world-class procrastinator. There is, perhaps, a grain of truth (but just a grain!) in that rumor. Of the 12 types of procrastinators pictured here, I am unquestionably ten of them: I’m not…
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Wall Street Journal: Tiananmen Amnesia and Tiananmen Exiles
Now up at the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report blog, my new column on Rowena Xiaoqing He’s recent book, Tiananmen Exiles: In “Tiananmen Exiles,” Ms. He interviews Shen Tong and Wang Dan, both important figures in the Beijing protest movement, as well as Yi Danxuan, who was a student leader in Guangzhou. All…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 