In China, people have recently emerged after spending months in their homes. Ching-Ching Ni, editor-in-chief of the New York Times Chinese website, explained to Zócalo how being stuck at home with her husband and teenage daughters in Beijing changed how they saw their surroundings and each other.
On March 15, I flew home to the U.S. to bring my daughters back to Shanghai. The sharp contrast between the way China has sought to prevent the further spread …
Since 2012, the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize has been awarded annually to the U.S. poem that best evokes a connection to place. This year, talking about “place”—a concept always …
No house on earth means more to me than my paternal grandparents’ small blue home near the bottom of a windswept hill in the Bay Area city of San Mateo.
I’ve …
When veteran New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield first met the Bogle family, he believed that nurture mattered more than nature in influencing people to commit violent crimes.
But how, then, …
California changes too fast. The new so quickly replaces the old. People come and go with a blur. I often feel like you can’t count on anything staying here anymore.
But …
A worker comes to Beijing, to Communist Party headquarters, and asks to see Chairman Mao.
A soldier stops him. “You can’t see Mao,” he says. “He’s dead.”
The worker returns the …
Less than 70 years after the official repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese Americans hold prominent positions in every sector of U.S. life. Meanwhile, China itself is becoming more …
As Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times, Geoff Dyer watched China begin to wield its power not just for domestic economic growth but to expand its geopolitical reach around …
It is widely assumed in the West that legitimacy of a government comes from universal suffrage and multiparty competitive elections. Yet this assumption raises two issues: First, historically it is …
