There are time when I look up at the night sky in Shanghai and I can’t help but feel sad because it’s always impossible to see the stars in its murky grayness. Last December, back in Massachusetts after a 16-hour flight…
The Shilin Night Market, a pork-belly-shaped stone, and other things you can only find in Taiwan
The plastic sheet doors bring a cool air and tanks of giant crabs softly scraping at the edges of the water, abalone, mollusks, spindly lobsters, sweet shrimp, tiger shrimp, giant shrimp, geoducks, mussels, oysters, and coral-colored fish. It’s dizzying and intoxicating and I want to eat all of it.
The Yellow Mountain
“The Lonely Mountain! Bilbo had come far and through many adventures to see it, and now he did not like the look of it in the least.”
The thing that always happens to writers
When I don’t write for long stretches of time, it’s not because I have nothing to say, but because I find that I don’t have the words to fully express what it is that I have to say. I’ve started and stopped entries…
An apartment, a boyfriend, and a dog
There are times where I am afraid to fall into the rabbit hole of my own picket fence nightmare.
36 Hours in Macau
In which we drink Port, bet on Greyhouds, and I climb a Portuguese fortress in the pouring rain.
Terracotta warriors, biang biang noodles, and other things you can't find in Shanghai Part II
In which we finally see the terracotta warriors and I search in vain for non-squat toilets in Western China.. The first day in Xi’an, I learn three things: When you are on the back seat of a tandem bike on…
Living healthy in China is exceedingly hard
a.k.a. How to survive Shanghai despite your daily diet of gutter oil and smog.
E.coli or not, I will never give up on you, Chipotle
A sentence I thought I’d never say: This is the fourth time I’ve gone back to the U.S. in a year and a half. It’s no longer as shocking as it used to be, and maybe that’s a good thing. The first…
On eating dumplings and wrapping tacos
Zandie effortlessly pops the entire clove of garlic into her mouth. It’s Chinese New Year and we’re bao-ing dumplings to celebrate, as per new year’s eve tradition. The garlic clove just finished its swim in a shallow dish of shaoxing wine vinegar,…
How to spend Chinese New Year in Shanghai
I can always get behind traditions involving food. Shanghai is wonderfully quiet during the Chinese New Year. This is a time when most foreigners peace out to seek warmer climates and most Chinese return home to celebrate with their families and be pestered about…
That 'aha' moment
I used to think that the way we can make a new place feel like a home, that is to say, like a familiar place, was by filling it with the things that make us feel at home. For me, that meant…