Coronavirus: Part II – Pandemic and Digitization
Xi’an and Beijing
I spent the first day of 2021 breathing out contemplative puffs of frost-fog at Ditan Park. The plan was to self-reflect and Think Big Thoughts, but I ended up spending the bulk of the hour wondering why the man walking in front of me had so many tiny labradors embroidered on his pants. It was excessive. His pants were single-handedly causing an unequal distribution of embroidered labradors globally. I didn’t get a picture. First regret of the year.
(more…)Abandoning US-China diplomacy: cucumbers and the strength algorithm
Posted from: Beijing, China
Couple of days ago, on my way back home, I walked past the old retired couple that live next door to me. I’ve been in this apartment for almost five years now, and though I’ve always been on wave-hello terms with the neighbors, we’d never really spoken. But this time, the wife, a Chinese lady in her mid-sixties, invited me over for a chat, and we ended up having a rollicking evening of midnight mahjong and Moscow Mules.
(more…)Coronavirus: Part I – Fear and Community
Fear
If you care to live a life without fear, for the love of snack cakes, do not study history. Or cosmology. Do not read about Rome or Influenza or the birth of our solar system. Do not form an opinion on how quickly and with how little forewarning civilizations cease to function. Do not read about wars, and about the many millions of slaughtered families who would not be uprooted by them, not because they didn’t have the resources to go, but because they chose not to.
(more…)Saying Nothin’ but Thanks: Getting Back to Roots in the East Bay
Posted from: San Francisco, California
One Valentine’s Day in the nascent months of World War II, and not long after the opening of his flagship furniture store, young Sol Wiseman’s marriage to Bay Area debutante Elizabeth Wolfe was announced in the society pages of the Berkeley Gazette. Just two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as the rest of the world was going to shit, he celebrated yet another blessing: the birth of his first-born son. His second son, my uncle Richard, followed two years later. (more…)
Chasing Specters: Ghost Hunting in Beijing and a Long, Slow Ascent
Posted from: Beijing, China
Wang Wei took me ghost-hunting last week, some famous haunt off of 3rd Ring Road, built and neglected by a Hong Kong developer. We weren’t supposed to be there. I know that anything’s a nightmare if you listen to it at the right pitch, but there was an honest-to-God dark stairwell with unmarked floors, and scrabbling hand prints, and flawless red spatters where I guess someone got really excited about their gaifan and made exit wounds on the wall in tomato sauce. And at the very top, a single light and a locked engine room door, behind which there are definitely Outer Gods holding court at the center of the universe. (more…)
Spring Comes Early: New Directions and Netflix Man Candy
A few months after the divorce was final, in the early days of January, I spent a couple nights watching back-to-back auto industry unveilings on Youtube. Maserati’s Alfieri at the 2015 Geneva Auto Show. The Lexus RC F in Detroit. Not because I know anything about cars. Rather, the existence of life on alien worlds trivializes our ant colony intrigues here on earth. (more…)
Typhoons in Taiwan: from the Da’An Tea Gardens to the Yongchun Hills
Posted from: Taipei, Taiwan
The national weather service tells me that Typhoon Chan-Hom is unlikely to make critical landfall near northern Taiwan, and will slam instead into the Shanghai coast. I stocked up at 7-11 anyway – water, salad, douganr, weird Haagen-Daas flavors – and now I wait for the storm warning to pass. (more…)
Off the path and up the mountain: Beijing’s Abandoned 0498 Military Bar
Posted from: Beijing, China
Holed up in his secret base on the outskirts of what would soon be the capital of new China, the traitor Lin Biao and his cronies once plotted to overthrow Chairman Mao. But before Lin Biao was branded a counter-revolutionary, he put his skill at guerrilla warfare to use for the Communist cause, mowing through Nationalists and invaders like a warm knife through butter.
“Hand me a cold one,” Lin Biao used to say, wiping the blood of the oppressors off his face. “Killing fascists makes me thirsty.”
(more…)Disco disco: Day-tripping at the Beijing Watermelon Museum
Posted from: Beijing, China
I like outings. I like the idea of a jaunty walk through whatever rolling hills Hebei can offer me. I used to romanticize the thought of riding the Beijing subway lines all the way to each terminus, and as the rail laid by the long arm of industry bore me farther from city center, the station names would become flavored with village twang, arboreal and sweet. Apple Orchard. The Paddy Fields.
“The next station is Biomedical Base. Please prepare for your arrival.”
(more…)VOX 10th Anniversary: A Jaunt Down to Wuhan
Wuhan, China
I realized as I sat next to it with a bowl of reganmian that I’d never actually seen the Yangzi. It’s muddy. We were down in Wuhan for the 10th Anniversary of punk scene mainstay VOX Livehouse, co-founded by a close friend of mine who’s since moved on to greater things. We spent a day confirming that East Lake is, in fact, very large, and two nights holed up on VOX’s second floor balcony with a crew of Beijing music diehards and ne’er-do-wells. (more…)