Lao Shi

My last day in China a colleague said to me: “I haven’t gotten a chance to read your blog yet, but I’ve heard you have a problem with Christians.”
Is that what comes across here, that I have a problem with Christians?
I don’t have a problem with Christians per se, and I stick by this. […]

Because I have a compulsion for completeness I need to disclose an act of self-censorship on this journal:
Several weeks ago I removed a post from January 3rd in which I mocked a colleague’s blog, a first grade teacher who wrote in December that she was happy her students knew that the true meaning of Christmas […]

New Year’s day, 2007, came to Shanghai dreary and grey.

Dan, Aliza, Shauna and I celebrated by going to the Shangri-La Hotel to experience what is supposedly the best buffet in town. I believe it – the place was food heaven, a mini-maze of food stations presenting dishes from around the world that you could graze […]

The New York Times featured an article on Tibet in the Travel section today.
Tibet has achieved such a great amount of buzz among Chinese tourists that in September I heard CCTV (the government controlled system of television stations) advise travelers to delay going to Tibet until the current travel boom slowed down. The Times article […]

Every so often – certainly not every day or even every week – my students make strange comments or references to September 11th. Close to the actual day, some of them asked me questions about whether I was in New York and what it was like. I could understand this. Stranger have been the times […]

This article on netiquette in The New York Times fascinates me: I’ve been using the sign off “best” in both formal and friendly emails and have never thought about its impact. Have I been sending a cool, overly formal message in my send offs? This article implies as much, whereas I’ve always thought […]

Dear China,
I am writing to apologize for being such a frustrated, crabby old fart the past few weeks. I hope you won’t take it personal, and while I won’t go through defending my attitude – which has been indefensibly negative – I do want to give you some sense of where I’m coming from […]

Coming off of a break always leaves me in a funk. That, combined with my growing unsettlement about the Christian community at the school, put me in a hell of a bad mood today. Please allow me to unload.
A few weeks ago, mysterious posters appeared on the school’s walls advertising the “KG Club.” They […]

I would like to take a moment to remember Sven Nykvist, who died several days ago at the age of 83.
Nykvist was most famous as director Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer, though he worked with many directors over his prodigious career. Images of his films are seared into my memory, and I did the best […]

Last week brought chilly, damp weather, an internet outage and a birthday, all of which left me feeling especially dislocated from home.
In the beginning, pangs of homesickness came on suddenly, and seemed mostly related to self-doubt and anxiety. I questioned my decision to uproot and move here, worried about making friends, felt lonely and distant […]