I hadn’t planned on making so much stuff over the weekend, but once I get started cooking and making, it’s kind of hard to stop. The start was breakfast. I thought about making the usual scrambled eggs and toast English muffin, but why take the easy way out? The week before, I had caved in […]
You know how when something goes wrong, something else also goes wrong? And something else goes wrong? And then before you know it, everything is basically wrong? In China, this rule of life manifests itself as a string of breakdowns. Something breaks or stops working or your landlord raises your rent, forcing you to find […]
A few weekends ago, on a bright, crisp, late-winter day, boyfriend and I headed up to The Schoolhouse at Mutianyu, which is, as its name suggests, at the base of the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall. Beijing was just beginning to thaw after a long, cold winter — it had even snowed during the […]
The Wall Street Journal looks at the downfall of the cupcake industry today, marked by the crash of Crumbs’ stock — from more than $13 a share in 2011 to under $2 today. I remember when my sister first introduced the cupcake fad to me. I was visiting her in San Francisco soon after she […]
Today I came across an alarming article on the Scientific American website about the environmental degradation of Yunnan, which I visited for a few short days in 2011. At that time, I did not know — and certainly our tour guide didn’t mention — that the province was in the middle of a serious drought, […]
There is a North Korean newsreel going around Weibo on how Americans live today. Its Chinese title is “The Deeply Suffering Imperialist American People”: I am laughing, incredulous and indignant at the same time. The things the narrator says are what you expect a satirist would come up with and said with such perfect deadpan […]