China
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Into the Tiger’s Lair
They’d been hiding in the jungle for two days, having fled their homes in Burma’s northern Kachin state to evade approaching firefights between the Burmese military and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA).
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Radioactive Mongolian Dinosaurs and the People Who Love Them
Here are some subjects with which this (extremely long) New Yorker article concerns itself:
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The Journalist and the Censor
Eveline Chao has a fascinating longform article up at Foreign Policy about navigating government censorship while working at an English-language business magazine in China. You can’t say “Tiananmen,” but “June 1989” is all right. The headline “China’s ailing healthcare system—and…
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Chinese Literature Making International Strides
This month, Mo Yan is the first Chinese citizen to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature, and the first non-European to win in the last decade. At the San Francisco Chronicle, Christina Larson comments on the growing market…
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“Corpse Orders”
The newest addition to the Lapham’s Quarterly “Voices in Time” series unearths a text from c. 700 China instructing spellmen on unearthing jewels buried with the dead: “Then proceed into a tumulus and select an adult male corpse—a body without the marks…
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What’s in a Name? JCPenney and The Dunce Cap
A few weeks ago, a slim catalog from JCPenney arrived in our mailbox. It floated around the house for a few days. On its cover are printed these words: littleredbook fall trends 2010 I hadn’t noticed this until just the…
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Morning Coffee
Mystery lights in the Norwegian sky. I love the universe! (update: Bad Astronomy has gotten to the bottom of it!) Photographing Las Vegas’ neon boneyard. Gerry Canavan points us to this epic document of classic scams. A family portrait of…
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Morning Coffee
Big Picture has some great pictures of the Berlin Reunion, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not to glamorize crime or anything, but this plane stealing kid is pretty awesome. on China’s Hakka “apartments.” Austrian…
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Hoping Things End Safely: The Rumpus Interview with Hyejin Kim
North Korean women risk their lives to escape across the border to China, where they often face lives of indentured servitude and the ever-present fear of being outed by the husbands they marry or communities they join and sent back…
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A Writer, a Traveler, and an Expat
I’m a congenital traveler, had been long before I wrote my first book. I took my first plane ride when I was two weeks old (taught me to travel light) and haven’t slowed since. Other than the frequency of travel…
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Counterfeit Smokes
“On first approach, Yunxiao seems like any other Chinese backwater caught in an uneasy industrial transition. Faded advertisements line the downtown streets, where motorcyclists wearing bamboo-frond hats vie for paying passengers in a riot of honking. A cheerful red banner…