During this holiday week, The Common is presenting highlights from the past year. Today’s highlights come from “Essays.”
James Boo takes us on a visit to the Park Slope Coop, while Deborah Thompson trades one piece of history for another in a thrift store.
Photo from Flickr Creative Commons
RUONAN ZHENG
Amidst glittering disco balls, fast drum beats, and fake US dollars tossed around by a random rapper, I am introduced to a guy who used to work for Vice China, making short documentaries. His exact greeting was: "Send my best regards to the bosses; I too graduated from there."
LAURA MARRIS
Still, I know from my translation work that if you want to learn from the dead, you have to visit their places. Just because a living landscape can never be a monument doesn’t mean it can’t hold the fleeting echo of a presence—the way an animal’s shadow moves over grass blades on the ground.
JONË ZHITIA
I never fled into exile, I was born into exile. My only home is the autobahn between Germany and Kosovo. Dissecting: Austria, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Montenegro—depending on which route you take. Home stops when the tires do.
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