1.

“I thought you would be Chinese,” she said, as she pulled her motor scooter up to the station exit. My bus had just arrived, and I was standing on a small patch of pavement sandwiched between a public restroom and a food stall pushing dumplings and buns that looked as if they’d been sitting out in a steam cart since the morning rush. By then it was late afternoon and the sky was overcast but warm, the kind of sticky humid feeling I remembered from my first and only vacation with my mother to Florida when I was seven.

At the onslaught of the red light, he cut the engine short, firing the tiny black sports car into the crosswalk. He sighed, cursing the wait, letting a mouthful of smoke settle against the tainted windows like condensation.

In Beijing, you can spot the arrival of winter by the candied haw fruit. Spurred on by below-freezing temperatures, candied haw – tanghulu – stands have staked out real estate by train stations, bus stops, and busy intersections in all corners of the city. Franchise-like in their uniformity, each stand is comprised of a floodlit glass case, spotlighting the colorful, shimmering wares as earnestly as if they were home-spun jewelry.

In the email flyer through which all events from the training department inevitably get disseminated, there was a cast photo from Sylvester Stallone’s dismal movie The Expendables 3 with a caption in Chinese that read:

IN FACT
Every member of a team is a superhero

COMMUNICATION SKILLS
So that each hero fights bravely with one heart
So that your team can become SUPER EXPENDABLES

After delivering a speech to students at Peking University on Wednesday, Her Majesty Queen Máxima of the Netherlands met with two of CFPA Microfinance’s clients in the rural village of Anyang in Laishui County, China.