My husband Neil had been badly injured in a biking accident in early September. He went head first over handlebars zooming down a hill when his brakes failed. He lost consciousness, sustained a fractured rib and wrist, dislocated fingers, and covered himself in road rash so extensive it looked like a Hollywood makeup job. A… Read More
by Arielle Emmett Tameca Cole, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, spent 26 years at Julia Tutwiler Women’s Prison (Wetumpka, AL) for a drug deal gone bad. She was 21 years old at the time and won’t disclose further details except to say that someone was killed. Today, at age 51, she’s an artist whose work… Read More
During the 1970s, when America recognized Taiwan as the “real China,” an exemplar of free market economics and bulwark against Maoist Communism, I lived in Taipei as a young reporter learning Mandarin Chinese. My host family, the Jens, belonged to the Nationalist Kuomingtang (KMT) military class, at once fiercely loyal to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and… Read More
In late October last year, about six weeks after I arrived in Kenya, I interviewed a Chinese minister and commercial counselor in Nairobi. Dr. Guo Ce bowled me over with his enthusiasm and immense hope for Kenya’s development and long-term partnership with his homeland. A few weeks later, he asked me to withdraw this blog… Read More
What a Nairobi radio hostess who busts marital cheaters can teach us about love. Yes there has been a huge hiatus in my writings here. Since my last post, I’ve flown direct to Salt Lake City from Nairobi in 20 hours to see my grandchildren, compiled 53 tapes of interviews, and met, among many other… Read More
A few weeks have passed. After awhile the string of conversations and interviews begins to blur. The faces don’t, exactly, but the impressions they make are something like Georges Seurat’s paintings. Pointillistic — dots of red, yellow, blue, white, and black. Assembled close up, each fleck means too little. Taken from afar, the whole is… Read More
Try making judgements about human beings and groups and tribes and nations just by what you read in the media. Then, go out into the streets. Hire a bilingual Uber/Littlecub/Taxify driver in Nairobi to take you to Chinese-Kenyan construction sites, as I did. His name is Edward Njogu (the latter name in Kikuyu dialect means… Read More
After staying in Nairobi 24 hours on no sleep, I took a flight to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to attend a conference entitled Africa-Asia: ‘A New Axis of Knowledge 2.’ The object was to learn about the region and run into contacts who might help me locate Chinese enclaves and business folks making interesting money… Read More
January 11, 2016. As I stepped off the train at Harbin West station after an eight hour train ride across the Manchurian flatlands from Beijing, the station was moist and frigid with the Siberian wind and the night which had fallen hours before. It was -29 degrees Celsius as I dragged my two suitcases and… Read More
Yogyakarta in Central Java, Indonesia is a hidden jewel, the seat of Borobudur, the oldest Buddhist temple in the world. I was there two weeks ago at 5 AM, part of my end-stage tour of Indonesia after completing a Fulbright at Universitas Padjadjaran in West Java. The stupas of the 9th century temple are… Read More