Shanghai Noir

Category: Amsterdam

  • Food Fight

    There’s a hilarious scene in Portnoy’s Complaint in which Alexander Portnoy mulls over the mysteries of Chinese food. the Lord has lifted the ban on pork dishes for the obedient children of Israel [but] the eating of lobster Cantonese is considered by God (Whose mouthpiece on earth, in matters pertaining to food, is my Mom)…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Bubble Life

    I live in a bubble. Holland is a left-leaning progressive nation that mandates universal health care, empowers foreign residents to vote in municipal elections and has long ago recognized gay marriage. The country offers free drug testing if you’re not sure about the pills you’re planning to pop at the next rave. I don’t live…

  • Migrant Writing

    migrant ˈmʌɪɡr(ə)nt/ noun a person who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions I am a migrant. I moved from the United States to the Netherlands because my husband got the job of his dreams in Amsterdam. My parents are migrants, too, leaving China for America for…

  • 2017 in Words & Pictures

    This so-called Chinese proverb is actually the brainchild of American adman Fred Barnard, who dreamed it up in 1921. He wanted folks to take him seriously, hence the fake Chinese source. Madeleine Thien is no huckster though she is a novelist. In Do Not Say We Have Nothing, she says the Chinese ancients believed that…

  • To Teach or Not to Teach

    I’ve been invited to join the faculty at the International Writers’ Collective, a creative writing community here in Amsterdam. I’ve said yes (of course) and have flung myself headlong into the training process. Last month, I audited three of the types of classes I’m likely to teach. This month, I read The Art of the…

  • Show Don’t Tell

      There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. W. Somerset Maugham And yet: everyone in the writing world will insist on show don’t tell. Put the reader in the room; let her smell the coffee or the roses or the gunpowder. It’s exactly the right way to describe the…

  • Pig Knuckle Soup

    My mother believes in soup. Whenever I was too sick to go to school, she would start a pot bubbling. I remember the reek of blood leaching out of bones. The suds that rise to the surface of the boiling water and the yellow pools of fat hiding below. When my mother wasn’t looking, I…