Why do the interesting things always happen in Chongqing? By “interesting,” of course, I mean things that might make good stories but that you actually don’t want to have happen to you.
A colleague and I were headed to the airport, he back to Shanghai and I on the only flight to Ningbo, for a project […]

I hate to spend my limited blog-posting time on political matters when I could be describing my aborted trip to the border of North Korea in mid-winter (I am being deliberately sensationalist here) or frothing at the mouth about the iPad, but duty calls. I picked up the gradually improving state mouthpiece “China Daily” Thursday […]

It’s been a tough year in China. First there were the freaky winter storms that hit right before spring festival. There was a horrific train crash, and almost a head-on airplane collision. There were deadly riots in… a place that can cause blogs to get censored, and the resulting international furor including attacks on Olympic […]

I’m reading “The Time-traveler’s Wife” while in rural Hainan on my baby boy’s 10th monthaversary, probably about as far from Shanghai (in a lot of ways) as you can be and still be in China. Well, it’s still very Chinese, which I suppose some places are not, but it still takes a full day of […]

Back in Shenzhen. I am in a luxury hotel room facing the ocean, and the best thing about it is that across from the hotel there is a small but steep beach that creates quite sizeable waves, and I can hear the comforting boom of the surf now as I type.
 The hotel (or “club”) that […]