Better city, better life – redux
From a small town outside of Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, he looked perfectly airbrushed to be the face of the upcoming Shanghai Expo: the proud craftsman behind the…
alleys
White picket fences
He was sitting on his makeshift porch, mending his bicycle when I approached him. He stood up warily and it was then I realized that he only came…
What next?
“We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If…
The remaining days
He laughed when I asked how long he and his wife were living in this house. “She’s not my wife. She’s my mother-in-law.” It was only after a…
大展鸿图: Achieving excellence
The room was neat with its distinctly light turquoise-colored walls and dark wooden furniture. It took a while to decipher the characters on the poster but it means…
If walls could talk
It was unusually quiet in this particular longtang*. For one, the cold snap has more or less driven everyone indoors to huddle around heaters, that is, if they…
The Indoor Playground
The girls slept with their parents in the same bed, and if it got a bit too crowded, one would sleep on a pile of blankets on the…
The Han (韩) sisters
So you see, I found them. In a spur of the moment, I had followed two faceless young girls into the alleys and it wasn’t too long before…
The White Rabbit(s)
For a moment, I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Trudging past food carts, fortune tellers and trinket hawkers along Fangbang Lu (方浜路), or Old Shanghai Street, I suddenly…