Eating Myself Silly

This vibrant new world was filled with all sorts of exotic wonders, but nothing was more exotic or wonderful to a plump future restaurant critic than the delicious things we ate for dinner. In Canada, my brother and I subsisted on gray, irradiated casseroles and the occasional hot dog from Howard Johnson’s. But in Taichung, we feasted on bowls of soupy, egg-laced rice crowned with jellied “thousand-year-old eggs,” crackly pancakes laced with scallions, and stalks of sugarcane, which vendors shaved and sold like Popsicles on the street. In this provincial little town, there were dumpling restaurants, seafood restaurants, and restaurants—set up by old cooks who’d fled the Communist revolution of 1949—devoted only to Peking duck.

Author: Adam Platt
Published: Jun 18, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,613 words)

City of Dreams

An outsider might imagine that the novel that captures China’s current gilded-age mood would be set in Shanghai, the financial capital elbowing its way into competition with New York and London, or Shenzhen, the megalopolis built on marshland. But Shanghai was punished by the Communist party for the city’s history of cosmopolitanism, and is still shaking off the effects of that cultural paralysis. Shenzhen, for its part, is a transient place that sanctifies commerce, not ideas. Beijing, by contrast, stands alone in China as simultaneously the center of authority and a hotbed of creative thinking. It is home to thousands of apparatchiks in the machinery of the Communist party, as well as to many of the nation’s most provocative artists, writers, activists, and filmmakers.

Author: Evan Osnos
Published: Apr 12, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,801 words)