Photo: Packing up the house in Beijing I was feeling bad the other day about what I have not accomplished in the last six months, since I moved back to the US, but then I started to think through what has transpired, and I felt better about my modest progress. Here’s my last half […]
Beijing
China’s Plastic Policemen
In a country of 1.6 billion people, one rarely experiences a shortage of labor. I regularly see scores of young women in fields, manually extracting weeds from grass, and construction sites boast armies of workers, clearing, stacking, and hammering. In our tony Beijing complex of 800 or so homes, all gardening is done manually: […]
My Chinese New Year Cheat Sheet
Can it really be that the year of the tiger is already winding down? Yes, it is true! Tomorrow we usher in the year of the rabbit. In honor of the New Year, I decided to publish the cheat sheet I wrote 2 years ago in Hong kong, when I was desperately trying to understand […]