We are sorry to hear of the death of Chinese environmentalist Liang Congjie who died in Beijing recently of a lung ailment. He was 78. Liang was the founder of Friends of Nature, the first legally-recognized environmental group in the People’s Republic of China. Historian and teacher Liang and three of his colleagues decided to establish a citizens’ environmental group in 1994. He said in a 2000 interview, “We knew from television about Greenpeace, but there wasn’t anything like that in China. My friends and I began wondering, why not here? We decided to try.” Friends of Nature has worked on important campaigns to preserve China’s forests and its indigenous wildlife, including bird species and the rare...

Along with visiting friends and family, exploring potential business opportunities, and partaking in the local cuisine and culture, an ulterior but no less significant motive for us to return to China this year is bald-faced, superficial, unapologetically-wanton materialism. Like many of her Chinese contemporaries, Yan is a very, very petite individual – just barely five foot one teetering on her tippy-toes, stretching for the top shelf. Subsequently, in the States, it’s exceptionally difficult for her to find a pair of pants, a shirt, a nice coat, or even a comfortable pair of sneakers that didn’t originate in the bargain bin of the kids’ section. This acute failure of the American marketplace to meet th...

In the Spring of 2009, our good friends Zhou Jing and Zhu Lei had a baby, a truly handsome little boy named Ben Ben. Though Yan and I have been subject to an intermittent stream of photos and email accounts detailing Ben Ben’s development over these past 18 months, nearly since the day of his birth, our latest visit to China marks the first time we’ve actually had the chance to meet him face-to-face. It’s a pleasure long overdue. Technically speaking, “Ben Ben” is just a nickname. The little man’s full title is Zhu Jun Yi, and he is the center of the known universe for at least six people in Shanghai: Mom, Dad, and two sets of doting grandparents. This latter group – a small army of grinning retirees �...

Almost every flight I’ve ever taken to China has resulted in a late-evening landing at the grand Pudong International Airport on the far eastern edge of Shanghai. This is unfortunate primarily because one really can’t see anything at that time of day apart from the runway, the monolithic glass terminals, a few planes sitting at their gates, and a million lights, of all colors, shimmering quietly in a vast expanse of muddy blackness stretching infinitely into the distance. This fuzzy, aesthetically bland arrival experience simply doesn’t do China justice, in my opinion; I step off the plane and immediately itch for more. Perhaps someone should hire a team of red fan-yielding Chinese grannies to p...

English is not an easy language to learn. Our native tongue has a lot of rules which are frequently broken. We are big on slang, and we often borrow words from other languages. Most importantly, English is a very dynamic language that changes constantly.  We like to make up new words, and we like to change words from nouns to verbs. Google, the name of a corporation, was quickly snatched and turned into a new English verb by net users. Example: “I googled my best friend from high school.”  And now we are “tweeting” and “friending,” too.   I admire anyone who tries to learn our language. It’s not easy. I took this photo in a small corner market in Nanjing.  The owners did their best to translate Ch...