Hong Kong, the way people here actually talk about it. Adams, the way only someone who lived there can tell it.
Latest Essays/News
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Taiwan Reunification at APEC 2026: Let Hong Kong Go First
On September 9, a reporter from the People’s Daily asked the spokesman of Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office about an associate professor in Changhua. Li Ci-ze, who teaches at National Changhua University of Education, had just published three essays on a mainland WeChat blog setting out what Taiwan should ask for if it ever negotiated a…
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Hong Kong’s airport is becoming a relay station, and Washington is watching the relay
Hong Kong’s exports just logged their second-best month on record, yet its airport shipped fewer export tonnes than a year ago. The growth is in cargo passing through, which is exactly the kind of traffic US export-control enforcers have started to pull apart. On 24 September, Hong Kong’s Census and Statistics Department reported that August…
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My AI Intern Built a Tool. He Would Like You to Know He Built It.
Work in Progress This essay is being revised. Please check back soon.
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C.H. Robinson’s Carrier of the Year Problem
On September 17, 2025, C.H. Robinson published its Carrier of the Year winners. In the category for fleets of more than 1,000 trucks, the list read “Super Ego, Chicago, IL.” It was the kind of announcement a company posts, a few people like, and everyone forgets. A year later, six family-owned trucking companies put it…
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Want to Stop a Trump Statue in Adams? It’ll Cost You Ten Dollars.
The boiler in the basement of Turn Hall in Adams, Massachusetts, was cast in Westfield and installed in 1902. The members call it the Beast. It has burned coal, then oil, then gas, and it kept a bowling alley, a bar, a gym and generations of spaghetti suppers warm through about a hundred and twenty…
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The Taxi Hit Her. Hong Kong Put Her on Trial for 91 Days.
On the afternoon of April 25, 2016, a Nepali woman named Thapa Kamala was crossing Tai Tam Road in Stanley when a taxi hit her. She spent the next two months in hospital. When she came out, the police had a present waiting for her: a summons under section 48 of the Road Traffic Ordinance,…
I’m a Hong Kong-based writer with a low tolerance for euphemism, a long memory for institutional nonsense, and a habit of following stories past the point where most people get bored.
Books
Longer work lives here: books, bigger arguments, and projects that need more room than a column inch.
