Happenings – Archive

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• Tuesday June 7th 7:30pm
  Paradise Lost: Economics Pyongyang Style
  A Talk by Paul French
  
  
• Saturday June 11th 7:30pm
  Foreign Babes in Beijing Granta (book/prose) [2005]
  A Book Talk by Rachel DeWoskin
  
  
• Wednesday June 15th 7:00pm
  June WildChina Lecture: A Glimpse of Ancient Anhui and Jiangxi villages, Southern China’s Living Heritage – Nick Smith
  
  

Tuesday June 7th 7:30pm
Paradise Lost: Economics Pyongyang Style
A Talk by Paul French

From one of the world’s 20 largest economies in 1975 to an estimated two million dead from famine two decades later, how did North Korea manage to mismanage its economy so spectacularly and arrive at its current disaster?

Paul French, the author of the newly published North Korea The Paranoid Peninsula – A Modern History (Zed Books, London, 2005), will detail the rise, fall and dynamics of North Korea’s economy and the likelihood of future change.

French was a founder of Access Asia, which specializes in providing clients with market research and economic analysis on the Greater China region and North Korea. He was the co-author of the book One Billion Shoppers: Accessing Asia’s Consuming Passions, and is based in Shanghai.

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Saturday June 11th 7:30pm
Foreign Babes in Beijing Granta (book/prose) [2005]
A Book Talk by Rachel DeWoskin

Rachel DeWoskin is the associate poetry editor at Agni magazine, she teachs poetry and is doing a residency in New York with Teachers & Writers. She enjoys rock climbing, travelling, playing the cello, dance lessons; she studies Tang poetry and translates Chinese rock and rap and has a five-month old daughter.

Rachel DeWoskin arrived in Beijing in 1994, to work for an American PR firm. Before long, though, she was starring as ‘foreign babe’ Jiexi in a twenty-episode television drama that was watched by an estimated six hundred million viewers. In Foreign Babes in Beijing the author describes her years in China, from the unique viewpoint of a foreigner experiencing culture shock in real life, while playing out a parallel version on screen.

DeWoskin and her group of American and Chinese friends witnessed, as insiders, vast changes sweeping through China as it lurched inexorably into the twenty-first century. As the author’s command of the language grew, so her love affair with Beijing deepened and became more complex. When she left Beijing in 1999, not long after the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, DeWoskin found her perspective on China, America, the world and herself changed forever.

Foreign Babes in Beijing is a one-off. Witty, moving and highly entertaining, it provides a unique, insight into what it is like to be young, single and far from home, and reveals much about what is still, to the West, a very foreign country.

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Wednesday June 15th 7:00pm
June WildChina Lecture: A Glimpse of Ancient Anhui and Jiangxi villages, Southern China’s Living Heritage – Nick Smith


On June 15 at the Bookworm in Beijing, Nick Smith will lead us into the rural villages of Anhui and Jiangxi, which evoke the beauty and grace of Southern China. Generation after generation have walked down these stone streets, opening and closing the same wooden doors, built and carved by their ancestors. Several of these villages, with their charming waterways, ancestral halls, and exquisite architecture, have already been deemed UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Fulbright Researcher Nick Smith is an expert on these villages and has spent a great deal of time in Anhui and Jiangxi, talking to families, researching the architecture and finding out why villages are organized the way they are. In addition to a slideshow presentation of these exquisite villages, Nick will provide a deeper understanding how the customs, religion and ancestry of southeastern Chinese communities breathe life into the architecture itself.

Nick Smith is a graduate of the East Asian Studies Department at Harvard University, where he was Editor of the Harvard International Review. A current Fulbright Scholar and Sheldon Fellow at Harvard University, Nick is in China researching the spatial organization of villages in southeastern China. He also works with the Cultural Heritage Protection Center and the US-China Environmental Fund on the conservation of China’s vernacular architecture

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