Gleeful Morgan Freeman and sidekick Jack Nicholson zipping along the Great Wall of China on a motorcycle: The image was playing, rewinding, and playing again in my mind as a tour guide and I headed by car northeast through the suburbs of Beijing toward the mountains and world's largest cemetery. Like Freeman and Nicholson in…
On a Sunday afternoon in Shanghai, I began a search for dental floss. It turns out that my roll of floss ran out in a country that doesn’t seem to use it. My exploration reached a climax at Shanghai's largest pharmacy, or so the sign reported in front of a building…
A few blocks from Shanghai's upscale shops and commercial zone, on the sidewalks of Old Town, street lights are dimmer and life is more Chinese. You will see bicycles instead of cars, goods for sale from bins and wooden display carts, as well as laundry hung to dry from every available line and tree branch.…
Shanghai, China's bustling world center of finance, is an easy city for walking downtown, shopping and sightseeing and gazing at throngs of passersby. Pay attention to the army of men in khaki uniforms, with hats that read in English: "Traffic Assistant" — perhaps from a stash of baseball caps, made of course in China, that…
When i was growing up, Beijing was known in the United States as Peking, which is a more English version of the name. In junior high school, I suffered a teacher who called the city Beiping and spelled it Peiping. All of these names have some legitimacy, but the city is now Beijing, capital of…