“Both hands!” cried John, the laird of the castle. I had missed again, and as I whirled on I breathlessly sympathized with him. How hard could it be, he must wonder, to get that second hand in place? I tried again, hooking arms with the next man, spinning, spinning again, and - damn - my second
Chinese food, anyone? I'll be co-presenting a program about gastrodiplomacy at Schwarzman College in Beijing next month, and I am looking for stories to share, from history as well as personal experience. Schwarzman College 苏世民书院 is a residential college at Tsinghua University. Schwarzman scholarships are modeled on the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford. The one-year MA program,
I was curious about mirrors in Chinese culture, having heard that they are valued and important, and discovered that they not only go back to ancient times, but that the early bronze mirrors frequently featured a symbol much like today's Chinese character for "mountain" - shan or 山. (If you only see a question mark, your
The pear was beautiful, brassy gold flushed with crimson, and heavy. The skin began to give as my fingertips went round it. “They’re very ripe,” Julia said. It was so ripe that I could smell the air in an autumn orchard, just verging towards alcoholic decay. I cracked the skin with the tip of my teeth and
