By JIANAN QIAN This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.   Alex dislikes the security check in Shanghai’s subway stations, from both an ideological and personal perspective. Being American, he hates any intrusion on privacy. And today he’s carrying a black

YUN QIN WANG 
June rain draws a cross on the glass.  / Alcohol evaporates.  / If I come back to you,  / I can write. My time in China  / is an unending funeral.  / Nobody cried. The notebook is wet. 

ADRIE KUSSEROW in conversation with LEAH ZANI
Ironically, my other biggest challenge was the way that writing never let me off the hook, into a place of rest, where I felt like I could easily “sum up” a particular culture. I wasn’t prepared for how the act of writing itself would become a kind of archaeology.

KATIE NOAH GIBSON
Lee begins, in “Margins,” with the koi pond her mother constructed in suburban Canada, her mother’s longing for her Taiwanese homeland made manifest in building a backyard habitat for fish too fragile for Ontario winters. “She planted paper reeds and irises, floated water lettuce in between,” Lee writes.

SVEN BIRKERTS
Why do we keep hold of certain things, and nothing of others? Now I can remember, with almost cinematic granularity, an afternoon when a veterinarian came to our fifth-grade class to dissect a white rat for our science unit. I feel the heat of the room.

ANNELL LÓPEZ
Last year, when she joined the dojo on Niagara Street, an older kid referred to her as Blackie Chan. Our mother refused to explain to her what it meant and instead allowed Junie to believe Blackie Chan was not only real, but so strong he could karate-chop cinder blocks in half.

Review by MATT W. MILLER
Sneeden, whether talking waves or poetry, is never pedantic, never flexing knowledge about water or literature. He’s just excited to make connections between ideas, fully and puckishly aware of his geeky literariness, acknowledging that “Nothing, I am told, is more boring than when I do start talking about the waves.”

TONY HAO
They erased the city’s impoverished past but in no way offered an extravagant present available to everyone. I decided that even if I couldn’t find Shenyang’s past, at least I’d like to see a reverse donkey.

ANNIE TRINH
He removed the soil from the newborn babies, took them into the kitchen, and placed them in the sink. Monoecious plants, one boy and one girl. Her father cleared all the dirt from their bodies. With a fresh towel, he cleaned their tiny hands, wiggling feet, faces.

TERESA ELGUÉZABAL 
A moaning by the labor camp dump caught my attention. Inside a junked car with no doors, our neighbor, Diana, was hugging and kissing a big boy not quite a man. I never knew his name, so I call him Novio—boyfriend. In the tangle of arms and hands, her ruffled dress slid off.