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 out about Hillary losing [...]

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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 perhaps, [...]

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1,000 years old, and a block away from a four-story electronics store

The street in this photo has been there for a thousand years, or so the locals tell me.
It used to be part of the city’s main commercial district, back when Yangzhou was one of the richest and most important cities in China. In those days, the salt merchants (who seem to be roughly equivalent to [...]

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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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Torch Relay in Yangzhou

The first thing I noticed was the hats.
It was 12:30 p.m. and the torch would not be here until 3:00. But there were already thousands of people at the head of Wenchang Road, staking their claim to a small piece of sidewalk and preparing to welcome the Olympic Torch to their city.
They carried flags of [...]

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