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Zhanghuashan, China: Week 10, Part 1 (We Are What Has Been Built)
Old buildings, in China, fall before the new. Outside of Hunchun, mud walls crumbled before concrete ones. On the outskirts of Ningbo, it is also happening. A horizon that used to stretch straight with farmland now adds circumference with the rise of apartment buildings and office towers.
Like all cities that back against cropland, Ningbo and its ( Read more... ) -
Owed and given.
I owe a lot updates - on my brother and mom's visit, on visiting my grandfather's ancestral village, and on meeting some of my relatives for the first time. I'm behind on a lot of things, really. I owe peer edits to colleagues, and data analysis to coworkers, and emails to friends. But they've waited this long; they will wait another night ( Read more... ) -
Song, by Adrienne Rich
You're wondering if I'm lonely ( Read more... ) -
Beijing, China: Week 9, Part 3 (Ceremony)
Many of the gestures of respect that people make naturally here in China were to me, as a child, uncomfortably strange. Little things, like being forced to bow to my grandparents at Chinese New Year's to get our red envelopes. Or my mom making me call the parents of my Chinese friends "Ah-yi" when all I wanted to call them was " Mrs." Those little ( Read more... ) -
Beijing, China: Week 9, Part 2 (Memory Shreds)
I've already started to lose the details of each day by the time I sit down at night to write. They slide, worms into the sand, wriggling away from the grasping fingertips of my memory.
And so when I pull, the day comes back in shreds:
- WenHong riding in on the bus with me. She's staying with me while she's in between school and her internship, ( Read more... ) -
Beijing, China: Week 9, Part 1 (Beijing Storms)
Thunderstorms startle me, here. In the south, as in Chicago, storms announce their arrival with slow darkness, like the dimming of theater lights before the show begins. In the bay area, storms last long, but are merely punctuation marks for the week-long rains that spin lazily through every spring. Here in Beijing, the light is already dampened ( Read more... ) -
Beijing, China: Week 8, Part 5 (A Beijing Electricity Guide)
A guide on how to obtain electricity for your apartment in Beijing:
- Wake up in the morning, flip some light switches. Realize you have no power.
- Take a cold shower. In the dark.
- Grab your power & water card, run down to the power & water office, which is the downstairs in a different building
- Realize they don't open until 9a. It is now 7.
- Go ( Read more... ) -
Beijing, China: Week 8, Part 4 (Not Finding Myself)
Today was my first day of work in the WCS Beijing office. I successfully rode the bus to the right stop, and successfully found the office in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It’s two offices, really, off of a narrow academic hallway plastered with animal posters. Tall, dirty windows cast soft light over the desks, all of us sitting back-to-back, ( Read more... ) -
Beijing, China: Week 8, Part 3 (Bliss aka Dance Class)
Sunday morning I arranged to have coffee with a guy who I’d met through WCS. He works for the US Consulate General in Shenyang doing environment-related work. I was late to our meeting (apparently it takes 1.5 hrs to get from my apartment to Sanlitun…also I suck at public transportation), and horrified at having to pay 21 yuan for a cup of coffee ( Read more... ) -
Beijing, China: Week 8, Part 2 (The Bigness)
On the day that I arrived in Beijing, the sky was clear blue, sharp sunshine shearing the air. I thought, “Goodness, they really have cleaned it up since the Olympics.” I didn’t know it yet, but that was just a particularly good day.
My taxi took me to the apartment complex, where Andrew Wang’s grandmother met me, showed me around the apartment, ( Read more... )