Depressed, yeah, but I'm also embarrassed, frustrated, anguished and still in a state of disbelief, hoping I'll wake up and somehow it won't be real. How it is that more than half of Americans can actually believe that Dubya is the better man to represent the US internationally, to make sober and intelligent decisions with consequences that will ( Read more... )

Episode 178 of "This American Life" -- Superpowers, from February 23, 2001 -- poses the most trenchant, pressing question of our time: If you could choose just one superpower, and you would be the only person in the world with it, would it be flight, or invisibility?

Three shows in two days! We played Sunday afternoon at the much-vaunted Beijing Midi Music Festival at the Beijing Sculpture Garden after the whole thing was nearly cancelled due to complaints by neighbors. I grant it was quite loud: I could hear Reflector playing from 400 meters away in a cab on Chang'an Avenue. They worked out a compromise ( Read more... )

Fanfan, Guenevere and I took the train down to Shanghai on Friday night to spend the weekend with Fanfan's family on the distaff side. Her mother is the third of six daughters; the seventh-born in the Nie Clan, a son at last, was an afterthought and no one seems to like him much. Number Two Aunt lives in Nanjing and Number Four (who was a total ( Read more... )

I managed, against all odds, to take a couple of days off from work (and from updating this LJ). Circumstances conspired to keep me from really relaxing at all during my so-called vacation: my nine-year-old niece Kaili, a terrific and preternaturally wise child who just left -- tearfully -- this morning, had been staying with Fanfan and I for the ( Read more... )

(Fenghua, Zhejiang Province, July 27 2004) - Sitting in his shabby room at the Fenghua Hotel in this satellite city of Ningbo, freelancer Kaiser Kuo reflects on his desperate need for a vacation. "I’ve been running myself ragged lately and it's not been any good for my health of that of my new little family," says the paunchy aspiring journalist as ( Read more... )

I've been working on a cover story for the China Economic Review about recent signs of meaningful reform in China's capital markets. It's been one helluva steep learning curve for someone whose formal study of economics ended in 1986 after a 2-semester macro-and-micro series at Cal my sophomore year. It was bad enough trying to sound informed and ( Read more... )

Dammit, didn't get to talk to Qiu He. Closest I got was a conversation with the mishuzhang and listening to Qiu prattle on a bit from the back of the Suqian Hall of the People for some celebration of the 83rd anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. I did, however, manage to visit the preposterously large Jiangsu Suqian Economic ( Read more... )

I'm in Suqian, a smallish city in northern Jiangsu province about 120 km east of Xuzhou. Suqian is the personal fiefdom of one of the most interesting and controversial characters in Chinese politics today: Qiu He, the secretary of the Suqian Municipal Party Committee, radical reformer extraordinaire. He's gone off the reservation, most Party ( Read more... )

Jerry at that's Beijing just forwarded me an e-mail sent to the magazine in response to a facetious column I did a few months back lampooning the Nigerian 419 e-mail scam with my own Chinese version, appended below. Here's the letter: Article: Your Most Urgent Attention is Needed ( Read more... )