Category: Essays

When I was about eight years old, I asked my ten-year-old brother what he was doing.  “Writing a book,” he replied.  So, I sat down and started to write my own.  I have no idea what it was about, and I’m sure I abandoned it quickly, but at that moment I began to think of…

Becoming a historian of Europe was not a surprising career choice for me.  I was born into an academic family, and grew up in a world of books, foreign travel, and schools that treated European culture as the cornerstone of a proper education.  I spent a year in a British school founded under Queen Elizabeth…

I fell in love with history in sixth grade.  As I snuck barbecue corn nuts (the least inconspicuous snack in the world) from my desk, listening to Mr. Sorum’s guest speaker weave tales of Aztec resistance to Hernando Cortés, the Mayan ball game’s ritual sacrifices, and Inca architectural prowess, I was hooked.  Later that year…

Growing up in a fast-developing peripheral section of Florence, Italy, I first learned to associate the word ‘craft’ to the construction sites surrounding our apartment building, with some architectural marvels and many genuine eyesores.  As a kid, I was generally entranced by how new shapes—some expected, some surprising—emerged from the painstaking labor of bricklayers and…

Growing up in a fast-developing peripheral section of Florence, Italy, I first learned to associate the word ‘craft’ to the construction sites surrounding our apartment building, with some architectural marvels and many genuine eyesores.  As a kid, I was generally entranced by how new shapes—some expected, some surprising—emerged from the painstaking labor of bricklayers and…

When I began my first year as an undergraduate at Brown University in the mid-1990s, I never imagined that I would pursue a career as a historian.  Although I had always enjoyed my history classes, I entered college planning to study chemistry and math, subjects that I had loved and excelled in during high school. …

Although history was one of my favorite classes in high school, I chalked that up to an outstanding teacher, John Smith, who first taught me in an elective world history class (which today would be considered more of a comparative cultures class, since the textbook did not pay much attention to crossings or interconnections). I…

For someone who has physically been much in motion with transnational teaching and research, I am struck by the extent to which my intellectual interests have been stable.  I was and am a historian, specializing in the role of media, communication, and culture in international relations.  The short account of my career is that I…

Chapter 1: By the age of twelve, I had been a refugee twice: the first time, when my family fled Chongqing (Chungking) China in late 1949 to British Hong Kong after the Communists triumphed over Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists (Kuomintang or KMT)[1].  As part of the Great Exodus from China, my parents did not…