The fireworks started just after midnight. The four of us – me, Andy, Rebecca, and Eric (their English names) – stood outside, waiting for them to go off. A large, red papercutting hung on the front door of the apartment complex, its Chinese characters signifying “double happiness” – two stick figures joined in an embrace, the perfect pictographic embodiment of marriage.
Read MoreAs Pretty As You Make It
It is 8 o’clock on the dot and the asphalt is spread out like a giant blackened fish – yellow stripe down the middle, white markings on either side like scales. The street is dark, save for an errant streetlamp and the light reflecting off the neon sign from the carpark across the street.
Read MoreFrom Malacca With Oranges
It was two days and thirteen hours before the New Hampshire primary, where back home Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, was inciting Americans to turn out and vote for him like it was their destiny. But halfway around the world, in the ethnically Chinese enclave of Malacca, people were met with a different kind of providence: the Lunar New Year.
Read MorePilgrims And Indians
It was a week after the student protests at Yale, and I knew better than to engage in even the most minor form of cultural appropriation, so I passed on both the pilgrim hat and the Indian headdress in favor of a Thanksgiving turkey that I traced in the shape of my hand and cut from a sheet of construction paper before circling around my head.
Read MoreThree Days at Hot Spring Leisure City
The first thing you need to know about Hot Spring Leisure City is that there were no hot springs.
It was January, and each hotel room had a bathtub the size of a kiddie pool on the balcony filled with construction tubes that looked like a cross between pig intestines and telephone wire. I called down to say something about it, but no one at the hotel really gave a shit. The important thing was that there was a telephone in the bathroom and a TV with 41 channels, and that every one of the company’s 2000 rural employees could say that they, too, had visited the capital.
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