At the flash of the red light, Baohan cut the engine short, firing the tiny black sports car into the crosswalk. 

“Ta ma de,” he sighed, cursing the wait, and let a mouthful of smoke dissolve against the tinted windows. He turned to Yueming in the passenger seat, picking up as if they were mid-conversation.

“And what do you do after you kidnap them?” he asked. “Force them to work in your brothel and wait on you hand and foot?”

Read more at ANMLY.

The first thing you need to know about Hot Spring Leisure City is that there are no hot springs.

It is January, and each hotel room has an unfinished bathtub the size of a kiddie pool on the balcony. The one outside my window is filled with construction tubes that look like frozen pig intestines. I called down to complain about it, but the man behind the desk just offered me a blue tarp and some tie-downs, and no one else seemed to care. The important thing is that there is a telephone in the bathroom and a TV with 41 channels, and that every one of New World China Land’s two thousand regional employees can say that they, too, have visited the capital.

Read more at The Seventh Wave.

The first thing you need to know about Hot Spring Leisure City is that there were no hot springs.

It was January, and each hotel room had a bathtub the size of a kiddie pool on the balcony filled with construction tubes that looked like a cross between pig intestines and telephone wire. I called down to say something about it, but no one at the hotel really gave a shit. The important thing was that there was a telephone in the bathroom and a TV with 41 channels, and that every one of the company’s 2000 rural employees could say that they, too, had visited the capital.

He met her over the classifieds; that was how it started. He was living in Beijing for a couple of years then, teaching, and porting in and out of Mongolia on a tourist visa. Truth be told, though, even the teaching was a stretch. He rented a small room in an apartment with a couple of other foreigners and was going out nearly every night. By the time Thursday arrived, he could practically count the stiches at the bottom of his wallet.

1.

“I thought you would be Chinese,” she said, as she pulled her motor scooter up to the station exit. My bus had just arrived, and I was standing on a small patch of pavement sandwiched between a public restroom and a food stall pushing dumplings and buns that looked as if they’d been sitting out in a steam cart since the morning rush. By then it was late afternoon and the sky was overcast but warm, the kind of sticky humid feeling I remembered from my first and only vacation with my mother to Florida when I was seven.