Category: Social and Political Pieces

Last year, I documented some of my encounters with a Sudanese friend of mine who was a Sunni Muslim imam. We went back and forth on a wide variety of subjects in our conversation. One day, we reserved a graduate study room in the university library and covered the waterfront on a wide variety of …

Continue reading "9/11: Learning Little, Forgetting Nothing"

During my first trip to China in March 1981, I had no idea that one of the great figures of twentieth century Chinese literature was passing away: Mao Dun, the pen name for Shen Yanbing, novelist and author of Midnight, the social realist novel of Shanghai in the 1930's. Long a place of interest, going …

Continue reading "The Sad End of Mao Dun"