This day, 5 November, in 1991, a high-level Vietnamese delegation paid an official visit to China, leading to the issue of a joint communiqué announcing the normalisation...
It’s pomelo season in Jiangnan. That pleases me.
Even if you don’t know its (obscure) English name, you know the fruit. It hangs, moon-like, from trees in parks and campuses everywhere. You can eat the windfalls, but they’re a little too sour. Thankfully, bigger, more-user-friendly versions of these yellow globes appear in stores. Open them up to find segments each as big and tactile as a Nokia phone. These segments are red (slightly more expensive) or “yellow” (cheaper and just as good), partitioned by a tough white pith. Unlike, say,...
Tea is supposed to be zero calories. So what is this shiny slick on the surface of yesterday’s drink?
It’s like the blue-brown façades of blocks in China’s fourth tier. It’s like a rolled scarab carapace. It’s like the squeezed temple of a liquid crystal.
Shake it and the metallic tectons quite collapse, broad shards collecting into one bronze rim-stain. Perhaps this is why we are frequently warned not to drink tea that’s been left overnight.
Well, if there is a swollen cigarette-butt floating on top, let me concur; that cup may...
We’d bought quite a nice one, actually.
It had made sense because we were only the second people ever to have lived in that apartment. Everything was very modern and sleek in there, though it was also restrictively small.
We’d previously satisfied ourselves with cheap water dispensers, usually in the ghastly blue and white of those tracksuit high school uniforms (when will these trends end?).
This time, we’d plumped for something black and dark gold, something like real furniture. Tall, free-standing. Space for paper cups down there.
When we moved again, it came...
If there’s one food that’s emblematic of everyday indulgence, that’s chocolate.
Delicious for most of us yet inextricably connected with fat, sugar (and caffeine, if you’re worried about that).
When my 4-year old daughter went for her second tooth-filling last month, the obvious culprit was chocolate. Yes, we are raising her in Shanghai, the saccharine city. And, yes, I should have instilled and enforced better brushing. But, rightly or wrongly, it was her fondness for chocolate that received the headline blame.
Dear readers, there may among you be some attempting to quit...
