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.
Read MoreClassifieds
He met her over the classifieds; that was how it started. He was living in Beijing for a couple of years then, teaching, and porting in and out of Mongolia on a tourist visa. Truth be told, though, even the teaching was a stretch. He rented a small room in an apartment with a couple of other foreigners and was going out nearly every night. By the time Thursday arrived, he could practically count the stiches at the bottom of his wallet.
Read MoreStrangers In a Place Called Home
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.
Read MoreBackseat Driver
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.
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