We were having fun acting like tourists in Qingdao, but I never forgot the real reason for our visit; even as we bought cheesy souvenirs and took bad selfies, there was tension in my gut. I knew I was going to fuck this up. Read More
ByGD
The Gift of Lily
ByGD
The Kindness of Strangers
A Qingdao man takes a break from blowing bubbles with his son to teach us how to fly a kite.
We were walking from the Tsingtao Brewery to Taidong Shopping Street. Beer Street fizzled out after the giant neon rainbow arch anchored by beer bottle sculptures on either side of the road, and there was still no sign of Taidong shopping street. We stopped two young women to ask for directions. I showed them the street name in characters on my phone and they conversed in Chinese, studiously examining my phone before typing into theirs.
A pair of young men approached and joined in. One spoke fairly good English, but his manner was as oily as his skin, and neither XX nor I felt inclined to trust him when he said, “I am going there, follow me.” Read More
ByGD
Stink Eye
My daughter is convinced that everyone is staring at us. This notion is ridiculous. Not quite half the people we pass stare at us. Staring is just not as taboo in China, and we do stand out. A white woman walking with a Chinese child generates some cognitive dissonance on the streets of Qingdao, Shandong. Beside myself, I only saw one other white woman today. She was one of two Caucasians (an American couple) we spotted on our first day in China. Read More
ByGD
A Weekend in Bend
Deschutes Brewery Pub
When I arrived in Bend, Oregon, I expected to run into characters from Tawna Fenske’s romantic comedies around every corner. I peered into the open kitchen at the Deschutes Brewery looking for the chef from Eat, Play, Lust. When I passed the bobcat enclosure in the lobby of the High Desert Museum I started looking for the planetarium that put the frisky in Frisky Business. I looked for Marine for Hire‘s Sam chopping wood alongside the houses nestled among the trees along the road to Mt. Bachelor. After discovering Crux Fermentation Project nestled between a train track and a freeway, I expected to see Believe it or Not‘s strip mall with a psychic leaning against a male stripper joint – oh wait, that one was set in Portland. And they are all fictional stories. The little town of Bend, however, is very real, and it is not what I expected. Read More
ByGD
I Can’t Commit
At the first annual Iceland Writers Retreat, I got to take two workshops from Pulitzer prize-winning writer Geraldine Brooks. For each workshop, she asked us to bring a short piece of writing to introduce ourselves. Because “travel” was the loose theme of the retreat, one of the options was to write 300 words about your favorite place. Here is mine. Read More