What my students know about Barack Obama

1. He’s black. 2. His half-brother lives in Shenzhen. (This was major news in the national press here) 3. He just won the presidential election in America. 4. He beat Hillary Clinton. Almost no one at the school has heard of John McCain, but there are quite a few students here who are still bummed [...]

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Yellow Mountain

HUANGSHAN – I’ve had some time off while my students practice their marching and chanting on the school’s football field during mandatory pre-college military training, so I decided to head to Anhui Province for a few days and climb a mountain. I hopped on the overnight train in Nanjing, where my inability to speak Mandarin [...]

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Military training

YANGZHOU – Sometimes, it really pays to work for a technical college. Take this morning, for example. If I had been a regular American citizen passing through Yangzhou on holiday, perhaps on my way to Slim West Lake or maybe a bit of shopping on Wenchang Road, I might have been a bit confused (and [...]

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The Sports Burka

BEIJING – One of the many things that makes the Olympics great is that at some point in the Games you are guaranteed to see something you’ve never seen before. I’m not talking about watching a man run faster than anyone in the history of the world, even after slowing to a jog and beating [...]

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The Bird’s Nest

BEIJING – Don’t we look great together? I’ve never had a crush on a building before, but when I saw the National Stadium in Beijing, I just knew. It’s the prettiest building I’ve ever seen. And the most photogenic. Trust me. I have 137 photos of it. And it looks perfect in all of them. [...]

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