The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he ha...
Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher.
In China, the transition has been to abrupt that many traffic patterns come directly from pedestrian life - people drive the way they walk. They like to move in packs, and they tailgate whenever possi...
In modern China, road building has often been a strategy for dealing with poverty or crisis.
A foreigner often feels most foreign while witnessing the early education of another culture.
When you live in China as a foreigner, there are two critical moments of recognition. The first comes immediately upon arrival, when you are confronted with your own ignorance. Language, customs, hist...
Akhenaten’s kingship provides an unintended caricature of all modern leaders who indulge in the trappings of charismatic display.
For a Politeness Monitor, these responses seemed awfully terse and uncommunicative, but who was I to judge?
Sometimes they seemed to grasp instinctively at the worst of both worlds: the worst modern habits, the worst traditional beliefs.
In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.
Everything still revolves around memorization and repetition, the old cornerstones of Chinese education.
I began to see motorcyclists who had attached computer discs to their back mudflaps, because they made good reflectors. In a place called Xingwuying, locals climbed the Great Wall whenever they wanted...
MIMI HAD ARRANGED A spot for Wei Jia in the children’s ward of the Peking University Health Center Number Three,
I realized that as a thinking person his advantage lay precisely in his lack of formal education. Nobody told him what to think, and thus he was free to think clearly.
In 1923, National Geographic Magazine claimed that the Great Wall is visible to the human eye from the moon. (In truth, nobody on the moon could see it in 1923, and they sill can't.) For a while, Chin...
People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of their suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live on. - Lu Xun
Look at America—children are taught to be independent and creative. In China, it’s all about discipline. There isn’t enough creativity, and if you don’t have creativity, then you can’t adapt and chang...
Mental institutions, rural health clinics. Once, he met
All the women who worked in the shops were unmarried, and invariably they were fascinated by the relationships of their foreign bosses. They’re equal, Rasha, the assistant at the Chinese Lingerie Corn...
But there were reports that Jiang and other members of the Old Guard were resisting retirement, and experts said that the Beidaihe meetings would be the first battleground of the political transition....
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