Megan Shank is an editor, writer and translator living in Shanghai, China.
I provide foreign-friendly recommendations for National Geographic Traveler.
There is one error. I told the compiler in an e-mail September 2007 to erase the Yuyintang quote since they had moved location and things were looking tenuous, but apparently she kept it and the fact checker never mentioned it to me.
More about my own recent [...]
I’m off to San Francisco to visit an old friend whom I haven’t seen in six years before flying to Maui to spend a week with my four brothers and parents on the beach in celebration of my mother and father’s 35th wedding anniversary. It will be the first family vacation we’ve had in years [...]
Two years ago, I gave up smoking cigarettes for good after an extended period of allowing myself to have one every now and again. One year ago today, I gave up drinking alcohol. This year, I’m going to give up worry. While it’s the least pleasurable to indulge in, I have the feeling it might, [...]
Since June last year, I’ve been working to cultivate inner peace, as it increasingly seems to be the only thing worth having. To this end, I do several things, including regular morning and evening meditation, meetings with likeminded people to discuss the idea of relinquishing the ego and grasping a more spiritual (NOT religious!) way [...]
When Adam, my fiancé, and I first met, I also had the pleasure of getting to know his best friend Ari Sznajder, who is simply one of the most talented people I know and who is writing an excellent blog about his MBA without Borders stint in Nigeria. Check it out.
A Chinese friend who has become increasingly less friendly in recent months again sent me silly nationalist propaganda the other day. After reading a story by Mary Hennock and Melinda Liu, which very lightly mentions that the Sichuan earthquake might eventually shake things up politically as well, the individual became incensed and scrolled the Newsweek [...]
Today at approximately 2:30pm, a swell of horns surged outside of my 19th floor office window. We are located at Yandang Road and Nanchang Road, at the northeastern entrance of Fuxing Park, and have a clear view of major roads such as Huaihai Middle Road, as well as the Chongqing Expressway. Outside, cars on the [...]
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 are YOU? Are YOU the British opium pushers of the mid-1880s or are YOU reps from today’s Human Rights Watch or Greenpeace or Reporters Without Borders? Or are 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 [...]
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 — [...]
Clear sun, air and dirt
You, state worker gardener
Leave me a tulip
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 [...]
International Herald Tribune
Net gives Americans abroad a stronger political voice
By Eric Sylvers
Friday, January 4, 2008
MILAN: Thanks to the Internet, Americans who belong to the Democratic Party are getting a voice of their own in the presidential nomination, as the party has agreed to allow expatriates to choose 22 delegates to the national convention as part [...]