Down the Mekong: Why Leave China for Cambodia?

Leeshai Lemish
10/16/2004

Christian, a Falun Gong practitioner, and a Tibetan Buddhist are sitting in a restaurant. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it’s not funny to the three refugees who abandoned China in search for a persecution-free country and ended up in Cambodia. Take one young man, for example. When I met him in Cambodia for the first time, he looked like he would have a nervous breakdown if someone didn’t get him out to a safer place soon. Continue reading

Southern Gamble: Mainland China Swarm to Cambodia for Illusive Money, Limited Freedom

Leeshai Lemish
10/9/2004

PHNOM PENH – Mr. Wang sits in a red plastic chair on the concrete patio in front of his empty restaurant. His cigarette smoke disappears in the clouds of motorcycle exhaust emanating from the street on a Phnom Penh morning, yet his voice, thick with a northeastern-Chinese accent, easily overcomes the calls of peddlers selling baguettes and coconuts. One or two Mainlanders from the neighborhood frequent his restaurant to buy a few steamed buns and keep Mr. Wang company. Their business is slow, too, so they pass their mornings at his place sitting by a metal table, reading a Chinese newspaper and sipping tea hotter than the Cambodian summer.

Mr. Wang’s story is typical: a failed business in China, hope for prosperity abroad, and a family left behind and rarely called. Continue reading

Google: Taiwan is Taiwan

Battles over Internet freedom, corporate responsibility, and Taiwan intersect in latest episode Continue reading

Book Review: Jose Canseco’s Juiced

	Jose Canseco, with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2000, prepares to go to bat during a Spring Training game against the Philadelphia Phillies at the Florida Power Park in St. Petersburg, Florida. (Scott Halleran/Getty Images)

It’s not every day you feel sympathy for a guy like Jose Canseco. After all, he had once been the male American dream incarnate who had everything: good looks, huge biceps, an MVP trophy, a World Series ring, a relationship with Madonna, money, Corvettes, and superstardom. Still, he ungratefully blew it all with reckless driving, domestic violence and, with his new book, barefaced promotion of steroids as a way of life and betrayal of his former teammates. But after reading his book Juiced, I find myself feeling empathy- not anger or hatred- toward the former right fielder whose picture off the back of a Macaroni & Cheese box was once a collector’s item. Continue reading