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Lady Bankers
As a former lady lawyer, I’m sympathetic to professional women trying to make it in this day and age. Imagine, then, what that must have been like in 1920s Shanghai. The Shanghai Women’s Bank opened its doors in 1924. A woman founded that bank. She staffed it exclusively with women to cater to the specific…
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Fork & Knife
The other day, I had a chat conversation about the word sommelier. One chat member had never heard it and went to look it up. Then the guy who introduced the term into the conversation confessed that he, too, had looked it up before using it in our chat. The subject of that chat was…
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Prize
When my debut novel was about to be born, my publisher and I worked out a PR strategy. Her preferred modus is to enter contests. My faithful readers will recall my attempt to get myself onto the shortlist of the Not the Booker Prize, a contest run by The Guardian. You may surmise by the…
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Maps of China
Two maps of Shanghai hang on the walls of my study. One is an 1875 reproduction. Frenchtown curls around the Chinese City while the International Settlement sprawls on top. The other map is handmade, enlarged so that it covers my bulletin board. I’ve superimposed the names of the past onto the streets of the present.…
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Chain Reaction
The Shanghai Quartet is going to be my magnum opus: four interlocking novels spanning a quarter century of Chinese history. Volume one was my my debut novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle. I’ve just finished the manuscript for volume two, Peace Court. While I await feedback from my beta readers, my mind wanders to…
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Batting Average
This year, I received 17 rejections. I’m not talking about sexual advances or job applications. This is about me sending submissions to a literary journal. My submissions might be short stories, essays or books reviews. But because I am a literary nobody, my only way into a journal is through its slush pile. the slush…
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Little by Little
The day Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, I hid under the sheets. I seriously considered giving up my US passport. Then I got mad. I went to my first demonstration and my first march. Meanwhile, I threw money at causes. It was my first taste of activism. But as the chaos…
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The Cop and the Showgirl
The Cop and the Showgirl sounds like a hard-boiled detective novel. Or a screwball comedy with lots of feathered costumes. But this blog post is about Meng Hongwei, the supercop, and Fan Bingbing, the starlet. They are the most famous victims to date of China’s newest form of repression: liuzhi. Liuzhi Human Rights Watch calls…
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Numbers Game
When I was a lawyer, people thought I was some sort of mathematical genius because I could read a profit and loss statement. And while I would never trust myself to calculate a discounted cash flow, I could act like I understood investment banker talk. Out here in the real world, however, most everyone is…
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Home on the Range
Texas, for me, has always been a fly-over state. Aside from a long-ago business trip to Irving, I’d never set foot in the Lone Star State. I imagined Texas to be one great stretch of arid land with only tumbleweeds to break the monotony. A place only Wile E. Coyote could love. Well, folks, I…