The market, May 2015. Photograph by Reinhold Möller, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

On a low-pollution Sunday last December, the weekend before Christmas, I headed to People’s Park on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road to visit the city’s so-called marriage market: a cluster of footpaths and lawns in the park’s northwest corner, where hundreds of parents gather each weekend to matchmake their unmarried adult children. It was the winter solstice: a particularly auspicious occasion this year, as an aunt had written to our family’s thirty-one-person WeChat group—a day on which it was said that heaven and earth would reunite.

It had rained that morning, so the air was damp and cool. I’d come here before as a child, glimpsing the idling marriage brokers—the “aunties” and “uncles”—as my parents and I crossed the park to the city center. Though I was now of marriageable age, I doubted I’d find a husband here, a city from which I felt largely estranged. I’d grown up in Hong Kong and visited family in Shanghai every year until moving abroad over a decade ago. The cultural differences alone between any potential Shanghainese suitors and me foreclosed the possibility, I figured, of a real bond.

But perhaps there was something to learn from the stand-in courtship practiced here, so radically different from the flirting and swiping I was predisposed to. What were the right conditions under which to find a life partner? Long a romantic, I had lately come to learn that love might instead be something worked toward, an earned outcome rather than a projection sustained until its inevitable end. The idea of courting prospective in-laws before spouses therefore seemed reasonable. This market was pragmatic: it conceded that familial compatibility could only help a relationship. It was to the point, with no beating around the bush about your finances or genetic ailments. 

I’d always enjoyed meeting the parents of friends and boyfriends—particularly the Chinese ones, who often seemed like strange permutations of my own: religiously preoccupied with their kids’ well-being and success, offbeat and quaintly crude, their politesse at odds with an inborn urge to voice their sometimes inflammatory convictions. Like the rule-abiding child I’d been, I was known to succumb to the flattery of my Chinese elders, who softened at my xiaoshun deference and fluent Mandarin—I’d spent months on the mainland as a child. I caved to cajoling missionaries at the supermarket in New York’s Chinatown, to the Mandarin-speaking Bank of America employee who convinced me to sign up for another credit card when all I’d wanted was to update my address. 

I entered the park through a western gate, next to which a Starbucks played Mariah Carey and Willie Nelson. The market emerged suddenly: crops of middle-aged Chinese huddled around laminated advertisements that littered the ground or were clipped to trolley bags and music stands. The otherwise quiet grounds, within these few thousand square feet, were beginning to teem with brokers and visitors alike. Fleece-clad aunties lined the shrubbery; raincoated uncles smoked under the wutong trees. I slipped into the sparse flow of people that circled the gardens and moved through sheltered walkways. Read More

Courtesy of Jake Lancaster.

When Alex Pretti was shot ten times in South Minneapolis on a cold but sunny Saturday morning in front of a doughnut shop, I was likely three or four miles away, speeding down I-94 to make it to the airport before my wife’s flight to Florida. She was surprising her sister, who was turning fifty. It was well below zero and we were all very cranky, and running late. My son and daughter were in the back seat. We passed the Basilica of Saint Mary on the left, the Walker Art Center on the right. From the freeway you can see Claes Oldenburg’s iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture. I told the kids to look, but the novelty had worn off over the years: it was just a big cherry in a spoon, decorative and somewhat obscene. We passed under a pedestrian bridge designed by an architect who commissioned John Ashbery to write a poem for it. The poem is called “untitled bridge poem” and is stenciled across the structure’s steel girders and ends with the line (in what I’ve always thought to be a satisfying anti-epiphany) “And then it got very cool.” There’s a tunnel after the bridge, and everyone holds their breath until we make it through.

I know my way around Minneapolis. I’ve lived here for two decades, in North Minneapolis, in Uptown, Downtown, Northeast, and South Minneapolis, and now in a near north suburb, but I still use Google Maps because there’s more than one way to the airport and there’s always road construction and unforeseen traffic and, for the past couple of weeks, the possibility of a protest or march or ICE activity blocking a major thoroughfare. Machine learning can predict these things. Most human citizens who aren’t on Signal chats or ICE watch group text threads cannot. Read More

Photograph by Krista Diamond.

The white lines on the dirt football field were fresh, but by halftime they would be barely visible. It was homecoming weekend in Trona, an isolated community established in 1912 as a company town for the Searles Valley Minerals plant, which first opened as a potash plant before expanding into mining several other minerals, including borax, sodium sulfate, and soda ash.

These days, the plant is still in operation, but there are fewer jobs and therefore fewer people. Trona is geographically close to the border of Death Valley but ninety-seven miles from the touristy part of it, which means you wouldn’t necessarily pass through it or even learn of its existence if you visited the national park. I worked at a hotel in Death Valley for years and went to Trona only once during that time; a Blogspot-era photo essay had told me that its residents had all left mysteriously and simultaneously, which is not true. But I saw it as empty when I got there, because I was projecting some sinister stereotype—probably The Hills Have Eyes—onto its quiet streets, which is the exact kind of orientation a lot of people have toward the desert. Someone at work had told me that the high school’s football team played on the only dirt field in the United States. Read More