To be in St. Petersburg is to tip-toe around the edges of a porcelain a faberge egg. There is something fragile, delicate, gilded about every memory I hold of my city. There is something romantic about its crooked and uneven pavements,…
Homecoming
I never got around to publishing this last week. I’m working on something about my time in St. Petersburg now, but my feelings are so different from what I wrote last week that I feel this needs to be published…
Shanghai-Tested: My first ‘Chinese’ haircut
The hairstylist put down the bleach and took out a jar of brown dye. That’s when I realized something had gone awry. As part of my recent deep-dive into embracing China local life, I took the plunge and did something I had never done before…
Immigrant Guilt
In the summer, Shanghai smells of ripe and soured lychees, decaying melons, and bodies suffocating in the heat. This summer will be my third in China and mark the beginning of my fourth year living abroad in Shanghai. This July will…
A morning commute in Shanghai
My scooter slips. I skid into a crack on the pavement and veer sharply to the left. The man on a motorbike to my left narrowly avoids me and squeezes past, unfazed. The car behind us screeches to a…
Spanish paella, LobsterFest 2017, and other reasons to celebrate Spring
I had planned to write about how the miserable of the past week, but instead I’m writing about the beautiful. I’m writing about the beautiful, because life in Shanghai has reached peak levels of the exhausting and the absurd, and when things…