Niall Chithelen is a teacher and editor living in Beijing. Email: nc464 [at] cornell.edu
by Niall Chithelen Night Bus—Beijing The night bus takes you across the city in a straight shot. This city has straight shots, it’s wide across, you span some middle area, and who knows where the night bus goes when you leave. The night bus shows up at odd times; you realized shamefully late that there…
by Niall Chithelen Drive the laneless roads of Lanzhou, sit the high-speed train, and then you are in the center of Tongwei county, a city among ancient villages, covered in construction works, ground floors of sliding glass storefronts, signs of green, blue, red, or black, with yellow or white lettering. And yet nothing shines here;…
by Niall Chithelen When the flight delay is announced, we ask what it is we have done wrong. From airlines and the world at large, the answer is rarely forthcoming, so we must look inward instead. This I did while waiting for my rescheduled connecting flight. I contemplated, for hours, my life, my mistakes, my…
by Niall Chithelen I tried to accelerate out of winter, really speed through things, but I think I messed up and broke spring. Definitely something amiss—nothing grew in; instead a green city flashed into a grey one. Lawns were unfurled overnight, flowers appeared, and now I sneeze many times in a row each morning. This,…
by Niall Chithelen Throughout the film Late Spring (1949), the protagonist, Noriko, hides her emotions behind smiles. She smiles when happy, of course, but does so also through moments we know must be uncomfortable or sad. We take special notice, then, of the few moments in which Noriko’s face truly falls. She cannot smile through the…
by Niall Chithelen 1) I got to see a different side of the Forbidden City when I brought visitors to there on a Monday and learned that the Forbidden City is not open to the public on Mondays. The side of the city that I saw was the outside, because Plan B (improvised) was to…
by Niall Chithelen It’s getting colder now in Beijing, and I can’t help but feel for the clothing left outside to dry. They had to hang through the night and on through the weak sunrise, doing their best to catch the wind before the temperature drops again. How do they feel being out there for…
by Niall Chithelen In the Mood for Love is an acclaimed film about unrealized romance, a film taking place mostly in those moments when two people cannot quite convince themselves to give in to the tension that exists between them. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Su are neighbors, their spouses are having an affair (with each…
by Niall Chithelen A number of scenes in Eugene Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We (1921) echo moments from Alexander Bogdanov’s utopian Red Star (1908). Bogdanov was a Bolshevik when he wrote Red Star (he was expelled from the party some years before the Russian Revolution), and his “red star” was a socialist, wonderfully technocratic Mars whose…
by Niall Chithelen Our first act of communication is to look in each other’s eyes, or not to. Many descriptors center subtly on the gaze: I might be shifty if I’m looking away from you too often and too purposefully, diffident if I cast downward when I ought to be looking you in the eyes,…