A stock broker from Inner Mongolia

If you’re looking for examples of modern China, consider my friend Aviva.
She’s the one in the yellow sweater, and she is dancing on the bar in a place called Zapata’s, in Shanghai.
She’s 30 years old, which means she was born about the same time China decided to transform itself from a Mao Zedong-led Communist state [...]

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13 years ago, in Tiananmen Square

Joan, a middle-aged colleague at Yangzhou Tech, still remembers it.
It was 1995, when she and some 20 other teachers took a trip to Beijing on an educational tour organized by her college. It was her first trip to Beijing, and doubtless the first for many of her colleagues.
She was in Tiananmen Square, where just six [...]

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Who will America attack next?

I am always curious about what people here think of America.
I’ve had this image in my mind of a group of Chinese college students sitting around a table after a few drinks and talking about what the Americans might be up to. Having recently graduated from a university in America, I know American college students [...]

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Things that just wouldn’t happen at home

The list, of course, is growing.
I’ve already mentioned that college professors sleep in bunk beds here, and that every now and then they might have to miss a class or two to “learn the knowledge of the Communist Party of China.”
But I haven’t told you about the singing.
Singing is a really big [...]

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Fetching water on a college campus

If you work in construction, they need you in Yangzhou.
I don’t think there is a place in this city where a crane is not visible. If you can only see one from where you are standing, you’ve found a pretty rare spot.
Almost always, it seems, the cranes are at the site of another new block [...]

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