I am not usually interested in awards. Although an award for a quantifiable achievement is certainly admirable, I find awards for artistic works to be quite meaningless. How can anyone say one movie, or song, or novel is the best of the year? Obviously there are differences in the quality…
First, let us be very clear about something: this is not a book review. I am neither qualified nor inclined to perform any kind of deep analysis of literary texts. There are scholars who are far better trained for that task than I. You can think of this blog as…
So you were probably expecting a clever treatise linking Victorian literature and modern Asian economic theory? Sorry to disappoint you, but I have nothing to say about either of those topics. This title merely reflects the two unrelated elements that intersected with my life a few weeks ago and spurred…
I recently held a million dollars’ worth of gold in my hands. This was not my own gold, obviously. This gold belonged to a company that extracts gold from the rocks under the earth and processes it. I was fortunate enough to be taken on a tour of both their…
China strikes me as a country that is obsessed with security. Or, to be more precise, it is a country obsessed with the perception of security. Properties are always fenced. In Suzhou, the fences are sometimes organic – neatly trimmed hedges of crimson and emerald foliage – but they still…
Yesterday I saw blue sky for the first time in Suzhou. I have been here for almost a month, but the sky has been elusive so far, always hiding behind a curtain of grey haze that continuously blankets the sky. The haze sometime thickens into clouds that turn to rain.…