Archive - December 28, 2021

• “Maybe you and Mommy should hav thought a little more before you had us kids!!!” — Devon Martin, age 7 • The attempt to be a stay-at-island dad was, at first, a failed experiment. I blame biological evolution. My wife points to me losing the kids in a jungle on the side of a mountain. Someone once said, “In bringing up children, spend on them half as much money and twice as much time.” In an effort to do just that, we left our whirlwind workaholic world in Washington, D.C. with our two daughters, then ten and seven years old, and moved to Micronesia – specs of sand stretched across one million square-miles of water in the Western Pacific Ocean – where my wife accepted a position as the Peace Corps deputy director for the region. At long last, time was on our side. Be careful what you wish for. . . .

China’s Reform Generation Adapts to Life in the Middle Class Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) made an unexpectedly early return to the U.S. this past summer. In 2019, the New Yorker correspondent, who served with Peace Corps China 1996–98, moved to the city of Chengdu to teach — more than 20 years after he taught at Fuling Teachers College as a Volunteer. He was planning on a five-year sojourn with his wife and daughters. In May he learned that his contract for teaching nonfiction at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute had not been renewed. What happened? The university emailed a statement to Reuters explaining that they had been unable to reach terms for renewing Hessler’s contract. Reuters also noted that in March, Hessler participated in the China Development Forum, “a high-profile government-run event, where he spoke on a panel on media perspectives of how the COVID-19 outbreak was handled in Wuhan.” And as Foreign Policy noted, the government of . . .