Isham Cook's Blog: Isham Cook, page 11

At the Teahouse Café: Essays from the Middle Kingdom

It’s 1949 at Revolutionary University. Chinese students spend all their waking hours in political meetings—when they’re not hauling feces from the latrines to the manure fields. Jump to 2015. Chinese endure endless meetings at the hands of bosses and are required to keep their cellphones on around the clock and pick up at once—or be fined. They […]

The many faces of Chinese “face”

APATHY AND INDIFFERENCE I begin my discussion with something that might seem unrelated but which turns out, on further analysis, to be the other side of the coin needed for an understanding of Chinese face, and that is the intriguing phenomenon of Chinese apathy. Take the Beijing subway. We see the grim parade passing through the […]

The breast etiquette project

Prelude at Annie’s I’m at an Annie’s, a foreign-managed Italian restaurant chain in Beijing. It’s become a trendy place recently as a consequence of locals’ worries over the food safety of Chinese restaurants. There’s also the rising popularity of Western food generally, as growing numbers of Chinese come back from trips to culinary heaven in […]

Honesty, diligence, obedience: Why I support China’s Great Firewall

Many negative reports have been coming out of China lately. A litany of scandals involving greed, fakery, adulterated food, callous drivers sideswiping pedestrians, and so on, have appeared in the Western media. Now there is much concern that China wishes to close off Internet access to the rest of the world. As a long-time foreign resident in […]

Massage and the Writer: Essays and Travelogues

There is no more schizophrenic pastime than the application of oil to flesh. Whether as bodily relief and relaxation, a means of seduction, or a form of prostitution, massage has long both fascinated and repelled. But what if these contradictory aspects of the practice—the therapeutic and the erotic—were seen as inseparable and integral to it? […]

Massage and the Writer: Essays and Travelogues (updated edition)

There is no more schizophrenic pastime than the application of oil to flesh. Whether as bodily relief and relaxation, a means of seduction, or a form of prostitution, massage has long both fascinated and repelled. But what if these contradictory aspects of the practice—the therapeutic and the erotic—were seen as inseparable and integral to it? […]

Isham Cook: 2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.   Here’s an excerpt: The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 79,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 3 days for that many people to […]

Coffee and massage in Burma

Walk in any direction in any Asian city and you will eventually run into a house of massage. My bloodhound’s nose could easily sniff out the sparse offerings on hand in dour Ulan Bator, Seoul, or New Delhi. India frowns on the practice but relies on its traditional Ayurvedic treatments (e.g. streaming warmed oil over the forehead) as a […]

My lovely little oriental doll: On yellow fever

she shows no emotion at all stares into space like a dead China doll – Elliott Smith, “Waltz #2″ Art and irony The doll image above is of a postcard I taped to my refrigerator door about two decades ago while living in Chicago, along with a second postcard by the same artist (below). One summer day I held […]

Massage and the Writer: Essays and Travelogues

There is no more schizophrenic pastime than the application of oil to flesh. Whether as bodily relief and relaxation, a means of seduction, or a form of prostitution, massage has long both fascinated and repelled. But what if these contradictory … Continue reading →