It’s the last half an hour of my time at my school. A school that calls itself international but is, like many things in this country and this world, not what it says. Today my principal threatened to count my day as a “non attendance”. This means she won’t pay…

Water is coming out of the taps hot. An umbrella is an everyday carry essential, both for the bouts of monsoon rain that pummel the city and for the sun. You know that feeling you get at the beach, when you’ve been under the sun for a few hours and…

The first time I cried in public in China was when I first got to Shenzhen and went to the grocery store and couldn’t figure out how to navigate the app and scanning machine to pay. The second time was today. I have wanted to talk about this for a…

I walked into the room through the wide open door, past the privacy curtain, where a medical worker motioned me to put my things on the chair. “Take off your shoes”, she said. I did. “Take off your shorts”. Uh. “No, I can’t”, I tried to think of a reason…

Last week a friend asked me what TV shows I liked to watch. We started naming shows (luckily they knew the English names, because everything has a Chinese name — which I kind of appreciate and kind of bemoan, a subject for much extended later discussion). I soon realized I…

I’ve been seeing someone for a little while, and last night, in those hours after midnight when pretense falls away, I found out we are on entirely different pages. My page was full of fanciful language and illustrations, question marks, exclamation points, places where I had gone back and underlined…

For ten years I worked full-time as an American Sign Language interpreter. For six years I worked in a hospital. My job was very serious, and I took it very seriously. Pressure to get every word right was high. Medical decisions were on the line. I now work in a…

For a country that is so strict, so absolutely black and white, things are actually very grey here, fuzzy around the constantly shifting edges. In a WeChat group I’m in for foreigners in Shenzhen, someone asks about getting an Airbnb for a vacation rental. After much discussion and speculation, it…

CW: trauma triggers This is a hard and vulnerable one — not a light read. Last chance. Ok. What are the barters we make in the market of human connection? What is the markup on our attachments? What is the exchange rate on love? The prices seem so high lately…