She held tight to the slowly rising rope. When it had hoisted her far enough, she bent her knees to lift herself off the ground. Everyone – family and servants – took a turn. Holding up the rope, and below it, the round scale, was the family cook, and the strongest man in the compound, Shi […]
Category: Memoir
Muscle weighs more than fat. That is indisputable. What’s weird is that the muscle in my thighs morphed into fat and then, like grains of windblown sand, migrated upward and deposited themselves as dunes on my torso. I did not suspect this shift in body shape because my weight didn’t change. My exercise routine hadn’t […]
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Rice and Race and Politics
“In the 1700s, South Carolina was the largest exporter of rice in the world.” So read the display at the Rice Museum in Georgetown, South Carolina. That must be a mistake. I remember my disbelief, even now, over twenty years later. Which part of the statement was wrong, though? Rice! I am Chinese. I know […]
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Ben Franklin and My Covid Year
I seem to have the soul of an 18th century Yankee — industrious, leaning toward practical virtue, and optimistic. Then again, that is not unlike the striving, entrepreneurial spirit of my Shanghainese parents. I’ve been thinking about these traits in the context of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and my Covid year. In this memoir, Franklin (1706 […]
In the spring of 1689, the Japanese poet Basho mended his cotton pants, sewed a new strap on his bamboo hat, rubbed herbs on his legs, and embarked on a walking tour. He walked 1,500 miles throughout Honshu, the largest of the Japanese islands. He memorialized this journey in Narrow Road to the Interior, a travel […]
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Finding Hope in the Trump Era
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death that late September Friday seemed too much to bear. For about twenty-four hours, I numbed myself by watching “Monk.” Events in our country were taking their toll: The epidemic. Black killings by police. Four year’s worth of Trump’s tromping on Kurdish and European allies; Muslim and Central American immigrants; birds, wolves, […]
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What Women Want
When I started medical school in 1976, my class was 15% women. St. Louis University was quite proud of being so broad-minded. Yet, two years later, when the chief of surgery at St. Louis City Hospital found out that he had two medical students with the same first name in the operating room, he called […]
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Iran: What We Don’t Know
General Suleimani Who? Is it legal to kill another country’s official when we are not at war? Does this mean Guatemala can assassinate Mike Pence for the two dozen deaths of Central Americans in ICE custody? And what’s the deal in Iran? They’ve been chanting “Death to America” for forty years now. I was full […]
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Thanks, Mom!
Who? Trevor Noah? That was my reaction when Jon Stewart tapped Noah to replace him as host of The Daily Show in 2015. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were practically my only sources of news during the George W. Bush era. The regular news shows were so depressing: I couldn’t imagine an administration […]
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H is for Heartbreak
So, you are a middle-aged woman, single, no children. You are English. Your job as a researcher and teacher at Cambridge University may not be renewed. If you lose your job, you lose your apartment on campus. Then your beloved father dies suddenly. You are disconsolate. What do you do? Well, if you are Helen […]
I had quite a few knowing chuckles reading Scott Tong’s account of his experiences in China in his book A Village with My Name. Like me, journalist Tong is Chinese American. Even though we grew up in Chinese homes in America, we both experienced major culture shock when we visited China as adults. Early on, […]
As the last hundred years of Chinese history has had more than its share of upheavals, every Chinese family has stories of separation, betrayal, imprisonment, exile and death. In A Village With My Name: A Family History of China’s Opening to the World, Scott Tong writes about his search for his own family’s story. Scott […]
Dr. Bookworm 