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Sweet Dream
My dream trip is to go around the world. No schedule. No itinerary other than a general direction: east, west, north or south. I’ll go pretty much anywhere as long as it’s a place I’ve never been before. To me, travel is all about the unknown, whether that’s a culture or a people or a…
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Mirror, Mirror
When the Queen in Snow White asks her mirror, who is the fairest one of all, she’s not looking for the truth. When Alice tumbles through the looking glass, the world she enters is nothing like our own. Maya Lin is an artist who excels in the art of mirrors, whether it’s a piece of…
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#ricebunny
#ricebunny is a homophone, an emoji and a stealth weapon, all in one. Feminists across China use it instead of #metoo. Why? Because of the Chinese censors. The great firewall of china We all know about the army of censors employed by the Chinese government. Some censors are machines that monitor Weibo. That’s the Chinese…
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Fact vs Fiction
Nonfiction isn’t high on my reading list. I’ll read it when I have to do research for my Shanghai Quartet. Or when my sons decide there’s something I need to know. But I prefer fiction that transports me to someplace I don’t know. Like Nigeria during the Biafran War or 1980s India. But now I’ve…
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Father Jacquinot
Robert Jacquinot de Besange is the stuff of legends. He was born in 1878 into the French aristocracy. The young Jacquinot lost his right arm in a chemistry explosion. Undeterred, he went on to become a Jesuit. At the age of 25, he arrived in Shanghai. His assignment was to serve the Portuguese congregation at…
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The Low Countries
When I moved to the Netherlands, my Dutch husband and I had just married. I promised to stick it out for a year. He promised, if I still hated Amsterdam, to go back to the States. My husband did all he could to prepare me for the transition. He gave me books to read before…
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Curve of the Land
Setting is a basic building block for any kind of writing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, prose or poetry or drama. There are lots of definitions of setting but I like the Wikipedia version the best: The setting is both the time and geographic location within a narrative or within a work…
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Prisoner #42816
Prisoner #42816 spent 23 months in a Chinese jail, first in the Shanghai Detention Center and later in Qingpu Prison. The charge was “illegally acquiring personal information” of Chinese nationals, a claim he vehemently denies to this day. Prisoner #42816 is Briton Peter Humphrey. Last month, he published his first account of My life inside…
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Orient Express
The first time I crossed China by train was 1984. I was on a group trip organized by the Smithsonian Institute, the start of a lifelong obsession with Shanghai. This particular train took our group from Xi’An to Luoyang. Back then, the journey lasted for 8 hours. These days, you can take a bullet train…