Olivia Zheng

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From the 17th Floor: To the Abraj and Back

October 12, 2012 Essays

I’d had grander plans for the day, of course, plans that involved walking through Bur Dubai, the old city, and the souks in Deira and visiting the beautiful Jumeirah Mosque, but the mosque tour was early, at 9:45, and nearly a 40 minute cab ride away… and then there was the heat. Even sitting in the shade in early morning, I was sweating.

No, we would not be setting foot on city sidewalks today. This was a blow to my touristic romanticism, my plan to experience the places where some semblance remained of the daily life that had characterized Dubai before the race to the top. Before the spectacular towers, malls, and hotels upon which superlatives are pinned.

From the Stone House: On Belonging

October 11, 2012 Essays

By MARTHA COOLEY

As the crow flies, Montereggio is perhaps a dozen kilometers from Castiglione del Terziere, my Italian home for a year. But Lunigiana—this northern part of Tuscany, between the Emilian plain and the Mediterranean Sea—is so hilly that I never know how many dizzying switchbacks a road might boast, thus how long it’ll take to get from A to B. (Or how many times en route our car will have to edge past another coming at it. Sometimes both vehicles must fold in their side-mirrors like wings so as to squeeze by.)

Reading Place: Insiders & Outsiders

October 8, 2012 Essays, In House

By HANNAH GERSEN

I don’t think I understood the idea of a “love-hate relationship” until I moved to New York City. Over the years I have become one of those obnoxious people who talk constantly of leaving New York while at the same time shutting down all possible escape routes. Having grown up in a small town, I can tell you that this flavor of self-delusion is not unique to New York City, but perhaps it happens in greater numbers here, simply because New York is host to so many outsiders — outsiders who eventually become insiders.

Abu Musa

October 4, 2012 Essays

By TRICIA KHLEIF

I last spoke to Abu Musa in March 2003, the week the Iraq war began. It was late afternoon, Syria time, when I called from my apartment in Washington, DC. I waited several minutes while the shopkeeper across the hall—the only resident in Abu Musa’s building with a telephone—summoned my former music teacher from his apartment.

I might have caught Abu Musa in the midst of a nap; he made me repeat my name three times.

At last, he laughed. “It can’t be,” he said. His voice, low-pitched, buoyant, was thick with cigarettes and fatigue. “Where are you? Are you still in America?”

When I said I was, I felt him smiling in disbelief. “You could be next door,” he said. “You could be down the street.”

A View from the Cheap Seats

October 1, 2012 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH BYRNE

Here at The Common we think a lot about “place,” but that’s not quite the same as thinking about where you’re from, something Sonya Chung recently mulled over in her column for “In House.” I find myself thinking about that topic pretty often, ever since moving to Western Massachusetts for graduate school two years ago. Growing up in New Jersey, twenty-five miles outside of Manhattan, New York City cast a long shadow. “The city” was as much a part of my identity as summer trips down the shore. My father, along with a majority of people in my town, commuted to work in the city every day. He would come home with his coat smelling distinctly like an NJ Transit train car: part newsprint, part stale air.

Time Shadows

September 27, 2012 Essays

By HANNAH GERSEN

A few months ago, while walking home from the subway in my Brooklyn neighborhood, I noticed a change in the sidewalk — four of the white cement paving stones had been replaced with darker, bluish-gray stones.There had been a lot of construction in the area, and at first I thought they were simply new stones, not yet faded to match the surrounding sidewalk. But when I got closer, I saw they formed an artwork, engraved with the silhouette of a young, leafless sapling. The etching was meant to approximate the shadow of a nearby street tree, although that tree, now in full leaf and several feet taller, was throwing its noticeably longer shadow in the opposite direction.

Review: This Is How You Lose Her

September 25, 2012 Reviews

Book by JUNOT DIAZ
Reviewed by MELINDA MISENER

This is How You Lose Her is the title of Junot Diaz’s new short story collection, though it feels most accurate to call it an exposition: this is how you lose her. And this is how you lose her. And her.

You get the picture.

As a whole, the book serves as a highly specific, painfully obvious example of how to wind up entering middle age not only single but feeling very alone, the last few decades of your life littered with romances that failed because of you. Because you couldn’t stop cheating.

Elsewhere, in Jordan

September 24, 2012 Essays, In House

By JENNIFER ACKER

“In House” is a weekly column featuring trawlings and reflections from our editors.

Two hundred years and one month ago, Swiss adventurer-scholar Johann Ludwig Burckhardt rediscovered the ancient Nabatean city of Petra, forgotten about by Westerners since the Crusades. Described in an 1845 poem by Brit John William Burgon as the “rose-red city half as old as time,” Petra was a gloriously wealthy city with an ingenious water system whose 1,000-year history and acres of archeological treasures are being excavated by a crack team at Brown University. A profile of the city in Smithsonian magazine convinces that Petra deserves its place as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, alongside Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China.

Writing in Place with Robert Earle

September 17, 2012 Essays

By ROBERT EARLE

Backyard

My writing room is on the second floor of our house in Arlington, Virginia. Sometimes I write on a computer located in a double-wide closet where I have a built-in desk and bookshelves. At other times I write at a desk overlooking our back yard; from there I see a small stone Buddha, a split rail fence between us and the neighbor, and a swath of trees that descends along Donaldson Run across Military Road to the Potomac River a mile from here.

Annals of Mobility: An Introduction

September 16, 2012 Essays, In House

By SONYA CHUNG

Click here to read more about “Annals of Mobility,” a monthly column here at The Common.

First day of class: after a writing exercise that helps break the ice – 10 minutes of “put someone you don’t know very well in a situation of physical duress, and write the scene in first person” (a few students share out loud, while we listen and then comment)—I ask the students to go around the room and say their name, major, and “where they’re from.” I use air quotes, and they all laugh, knowingly. We all understand that the question is fraught, and complex. In this room of twelve (including me), a college classroom in New York City, only two offer a simple answer to the question: I am from Dallas, Texas. I am from Atlanta, Georgia. Third and fourth generation, respectively. Two out of twelve.