This day, 8 April, in 1968, China, the governments of Tanzania and Zambia signed protocols as to the construction of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, for which the Chinese...
We can never borrow each other’s mouths. I will never know what it means to taste the way you do, nor you me.
Then again, perhaps if we could try that, we would no longer be the sufficiently the same people we originally were to make the new observation meaningful...
Anyway, that imperfect empathy is part of the tragedy of writing and reading about food and drink. I also often wonder if my speculations on taste may be even less meaningful to someone who has a Y chromosome.
In Classical legend, there...
This frisbee-full of dried packed leaves cost me ¥260 .
Buying a whole cake of tea (茶饼) is a bigger commitment than some buyers are willing to make. But, in the case of some varieties of tea, it’s the form factor which makers and sellers prefer to work with.
I’ve owned cakes before, of course. But this one is different, because it’s our first white tea cake.
That makes a difference because it can be consumed guilt free, with no sense of wrecking destiny; unlike pu er, there is no pretense about...
Dressing up schoolwork as a toy. It’s such a hoary old cliché it might just work.
I’m hoping to coax out some actual written words from my students by inviting them to play with the paper itself; dirty it up a little for display purposes.
Harper Lee herself describes it as a “filthy piece of paper”, the note that two children try to post through the broken slats of the Boo Radley house, “Boo” being the nickname of the mysterious recluse in To Kill a Mockingbird.
If successfully coaxed, my students will...
Of course it’s not reasonable to expect commemoration or contemplation.
The “Great War” was concluded more than a century ago. How can I expect “the eleventh day of the eleventh month” to resonate somewhere so far away from where the Armistice was signed?
Yes, China was the non-European nation which committed most men to that war, with real casualties and real costs. It’s a story that needs telling, one which may one day receive more airing. But those events are too far away to claim such as exclusive calendar slot in...
