The featured image pairs “Untitled (Portrait of a Man)” by Unknown (1865) with a marketing photo from visitplymouth.co.uk — images chosen specifically for this piece by The Seventh Wave Art Director, Meg Sykes.

Tomorrow Will Be Even Brighter

July 08, 2022

The first thing you need to know about Hot Spring Leisure City is that there are no hot springs.

It is January, and each hotel room has an unfinished bathtub the size of a kiddie pool on the balcony. The one outside my window is filled with construction tubes that look like frozen pig intestines. I called down to complain about it, but the man behind the desk just offered me a blue tarp and some tie-downs, and no one else seemed to care. The important thing is that there is a telephone in the bathroom and a TV with 41 channels, and that every one of New World China Land’s two thousand regional employees can say that they, too, have visited the capital.

be/longing: Asian Americans Now

May 24, 2022

What does it mean to belong? During the pandemic, misinformation about the coronavirus contributed to an alarming spike in racial violence against Asian Americans. The pandemic became an excuse for anti-Asian xenophobia, drawing attention to a painful reality: In this country, Asian Americans—even when born and raised here—often are viewed and treated as perpetual outsiders.

be/longing: Asian Americans Now profiles Asian American trailblazers from across the country in five stories of belonging and exclusion; resilience and hope; and solidarity in the face of hate.

be/longing: Asian Americans Now is a co-production of Exploring Hate and The Serica Initiative.

Watch at PBS.

The Interminable Bento

August 11, 2021

Noon came, and with it the sound of plastic rustling outside my door. I waited for the footsteps to grow faint as they padded down the hallway, followed by the ding of the elevator, then silence. I stuck my head out just beyond the threshold of the doorframe—and no further. We’d all heard the story, by then, of the woman who was fined $3,500 for walking down the hall in her quarantine hotel to retrieve boiling water for instant noodles. At my feet lay the telltale plastic bag, striped pink and white like a candy cane. And inside it, the squat, horizontal box that would be my resilient companion for the next fourteen days.

Petaluma

April 01, 2021

“Do you ever feel like you’re losing it?” she asks. We’ve just finished dinner—shrimp fajitas from La Cocina—and Chloe glares at me across the table. She’s smiling the smile that, in a former time, I might have perceived as an opening, but by now has already changed into something else.

How a dated cell phone challenged everything I knew about China

March 30, 2021

The Nokia 1110 can barely do more than send texts (it doesn't even have a flashlight). But in 2009, it was my only lifeline to the people of northern China, where I taught English in the small rural town of Taigu. Over a decade later—with US-China relations at a historic low—the Nokia 1110, for all its technological deficiencies, represents something aspirational: the renewed promise of cross-cultural friendship.