Talking to my mother about Hong Kong
I wonder how much my mother has been projecting our tortured relationship onto the events in Hong Kong over the…
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The Holy and the Broken
Salam: the First ****** Nobel Laureate is a documentary currently streaming on Netflix that looks at the life of Abdus Salam,…
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Hands That Feed
At a time when ethno-authoritarianism is on the rise across the globe, often aided by new technology, the idea that…
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Freedom in Dissent
As protests rage in Hong Kong, Yangyang Cheng thinks about her own experience with expression and dissent. “Are…
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‘Communism is a faith’
90 million people are officially members of the Chinese Communist Party. Why have they chosen to take the pledge? And…
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The Highest Exam
The gaokao is the most formidable test in the world. Literally “the high exam,” it is China’s National College Entrance Examination,…
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My science has no nationality
For Chinese scientists who immigrated to the U.S., where do their hearts and bodies belong? In their home country, where…
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Protesting in the name of science: The legacy of China’s May Fourth Movement
A hundred years after the rally for “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” can the pursuit of scientific truth bring political…
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Thicker than blood
For a young Chinese woman, pursuing a career in the physical sciences implies defying societal expectations of a woman’s body,…
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The Chinese scientist and the foreign tongue
For generations of Chinese scientists, the cultivating of a foreign tongue was not only a tool to help untangle the…
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For science, or the ‘motherland’? The dilemma facing China’s brightest minds
Pictured: Tsung-Dao Lee (left) and Chen Ning Yang (right) The fathers of modern Chinese physics survived idealism and endured persecution.…
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