Megan Shank dot com

Watching CCTV Xinwen (news channel) tonight, I witnessed something that touched me to the core.
A trapped woman waiting for rescue workers to dig her out told cameras poking down into her hole (in Chinese):
“I knew you would come to save me. When I heard voices nearby, I would call for help. When I […]

Around 2:30 yesterday, in my 19th floor Shanghai office, a wave of nausea overtook me. I felt dizzy and my stomach looped. Later I found out it was the Sichuan 7.8 earthquake. Growing up in Nebraska, I became accustomed to hiding in the basement several times each spring when tornados struck, but this was something […]

The poem pasted below has been circulating around in e-mail forwards for weeks, and I’ve just one question. Who is YOU? Is YOU the British opium pushers of the mid-1880s or is YOU reps from today’s Human Rights Watch or Greenpeace or Reporters Without Borders? Or is YOU Joseph McCarthy railing against Red China?
The […]

Recently I’ve begun studying Spanish. This has been a long-standing desire, and my goal is to eventually achieve decent proficiency. A few nights ago, I made a late-night iTunes buy that has proved alternately amusing and effective.
First, let me explain: I’m a musical person and find that using music has always been an effective […]

Behind Tom Cook’s placid Midwest American countenance beats a heart that quickens for silicone innovation. As Greater China President of Dow Corning, the U.S.-based silicone company that’s been in China for 35 years, Cook has overseen projects such as producing rust-proofing material for support pillars on the Hangzhou Bay Bridge—the world’s longest trans-oceanic bridge. He […]

International cosmetics companies cream the market.
by Megan Shank (Shanghai)
On a recent sunny day, 26-year-old Anne Li and 27-year-old Amy Lei browse Shanghai’s Huaihai Middle Road Sephora store during their lunch break. The two epitomize the Chinese cosmetic market’s coveted consumer—both are highly educated only children born into China’s affluent modern era, products of homes where […]

By Megan Shank (Shanghai)
No one wants rain at the games this summer, but should it pour, GE has provided Beijing’s National Stadium with China’s first rainwater recycling system to process the downfall for landscaping, fire-fighting and cleaning—that’s saving water that otherwise would have come from traditional sources. The company is also supplying filtration technology for […]

I’m writing and editing others’ writing for a play– a compilation of monologues on a theme. Here’s one I’ve written:
Dollface
by Megan Shank
Even now their faces haunt me: round and cotton, oval and porcelain, square and plastic, mean, cute, shrewd. Blue eyes, brown, stitched or stuck in, lashes, bare, lids and lidless. Button noses. Quiet […]

Ok, ok. So in the advertisement for this t-shirt, I think they meant “a part” rather than “apart,” as it appears in the video from which the meme came. English is a complicated language, and these are complicated issues with vastly different opinions and interpretations that arise from looking at very similar components. The basic […]

Instead of trying to put out the Olympic torch, which admittedly possesses the thrill of self-righteousness but means absolutely nothing in the final analysis, buy less made-in-China crap, which is a less comfortable solution but has a stronger impact. Or call up a corporate sponsor of the Olympics — say McDonald’s, Adidas, UPS, Snickers — […]

I’ve been working with a talented intern who writes Chinese copy that I edit and tweak in Chinese before translating and rewriting in English. Then she modifies the final Chinese product. Below, I include the English version of a sidebar that ran in April’s Enterprise section.
CSR: Where Do We Go Now?
By Sarah Chen
Only two […]

Again, this story originally ran in Newsweek International, and then I supplemented a Chinese angle for a March 2008 run. You’ll notice how this is definitely for the Chinese reader now — I’m even explaining common English phrases. I also took the portrait to illustrate this story, which I’ll link to later.
You Called For […]

One of the things we do quite often at Newsweek Select is take Newsweek International content and then “localize” it. That is we supplement the article with a local angle and local people. In recent months, as I’ve been working on a lot of planning aspects for the magazine, we’ve been concentrating our efforts on […]

Clear sun, air and dirt
You, state worker gardener
Leave me a tulip

This was an interview I did with CEO of Focus Media, Jiang Nanchun, for our first edition of Enterprise. Each month, I’ll conduct an interview with a Chinese business leader. I did this interview in Chinese and then translated it into English. Below, find both versions.
Q&A with Megan Shank
Bring the Noise, Bring the AD
According […]

It’s been some time since I’ve visited this blog, and I feel compelled to check in and say hello. The past month and a half has been challenging on so many levels, but it has also been full of awesome things like a trip to Hanoi and a Bjork concert and an amazing act of […]

Today while at a Bund-side five-star hotel’s cafe where I was conducting an interview for the Enterprise section we’ll launch in March’s edition of Newsweek Select, a troop of 30-plus mud-covered construction workers tromped in with their rubber boots and construction hats and plopped down next to white collar workers disinterestedly sipping 55RMB ($7) […]

BLOG for Huffpo
The Chinese can rest easy tonight. I should know. I saw it on the news.
Tonight, I flipped on the evening broadcast of CCTV1. The station is part of the China Central Television (CCTV) family, which also runs channels such as CCTV2, CCTV3, CCTV4, CCTV5, and, well, you get the gist. Not exactly creatively […]

My cousin, Jenny Shank (or J. Alicia Shank), whose work has been featured in a variety of renown fiction magazines, is a semi-finalist in the Amazon-Penguin Breakthrough Novel competition. Please download her work, read, and provide your comments (and stars!!!) Her wry, subtle humor and deep sympathy for her characters will hook you.

Via Skype, Adam and I review a translation together during one of my 15-hour work days. We are stuck on one of those paragraph-long sentences by a Chinese academic.
Adam: “Passive voice is like hiding the ball.”
Megan: “No one acts. Instead, everyone, everything is acted upon. Maybe it makes sense that many Chinese write this […]