China Law Blog

Whenever I come across a really good China blog that has been around for more than a few months, I get irritated. I get irritated at myself and at those who are supposed to be assisting me on this blog for not having discovered it sooner. I also get irritated at the Chinese blogosphere for not having linked over to it. The known is always easy.

I am irritated today because I just came across an excellent China-ish blog that has been around since late last year and, as far as I know, has yet to be cited. Whoops. I just ran a Google blog search and I see that my friend Richard over at Peking Duck beat me to it on this. Kudos to Richard for reducing my irritation a bit.

Inside-out China is written by Xujun Eberlein, who describes herself as follows:

Xujun Eberlein grew up in Chongqing, China, and moved to the United States in the summer of 1988. After receiving a Ph.D. from MIT in the spring of 1995, and winning an award for her dissertation, she joined a small but ambitious high tech company. On Thanksgiving 2003, she gave up tech for writing. She has since won many literary awards. Her stories and personal essays have been published in the United States, Canada, England, Kenya, and Hong Kong, in magazines such as AGNI, Walrus, PRISM International, StoryQuarterly, Stand and Kwani. Her debut story collection Apologies Forthcoming won the 2007 Tartt Fiction Award and will be published in May 2008. She hosts the literary and cultural blog Inside-out China.

She is the author of the recently published book, Apologies Forthcoming, which is described as follows:

Four decades ago China was embroiled in the Cultural Revolution, a period that turned the country on end and defined the generation of Chinese now coming to power. This collection of stories opens a different door to life during and after that time.

When I recommended Blogging for China just last week, I talked about the dearth of well written China blogs in English by those with a China perspective:

One of the things that has surprised me about this blog (China Law Blog) is how seldom people seek to take us to task on our blogroll. If I were a reader, I would have long ago complained about our failure to include China blogs with more of a Chinese perspective. My explanation is that I tend to be pretty intolerant of blogs that are not well written and, let's face it, it is very difficult to write well in a foreign language. Blogging for China is an exception in this regard because it is plenty well writtten. From whence do its writers come?

Inside-out China, though about way more than just China, is both insightful and well written and I have added it to our blogroll.

Just as an aside, Ms. Eberlein has a Chinese saying on her site that I just love: "As long as the green mountains remain, don't worry about firewood."