Evan Osnos gives an intriguing glimpse into a few Chinese lives during the American election:

Election night in America is a breakfast affair in Beijing, and it unfolds as most of China is commuting to work on Nov. 5th. This year, the American Embassy and the American Chamber of Commerce rented out a hotel ballroom so that Chinese and foreign guests could watch live results of what members of the China media had declared “The Decisive Battle between the Donkey and the Elephant.” …

Standing quietly near the coffee machines was Wang Chong, a writer at China Youth Daily, who had more than the usual familiarity with Obama. In the summer of 2004, he was in the United States under a State Department exchange program but he failed to interview any big-name candidates. An American friend suggested he seek out Obama, then a star in the Illinois State Senate. Wang ended up at a baseball field in Springfield, Illinois, where Obama delivered a speech that sounded, to Wang, like Martin Luther King. He knew the cadence: he had placed third in an English-speaking contest in China by reciting, “I Have a Dream.”

Wang, who is thirty-three, with large eyes and a thick brush of hair, had approached the stage. “He said ‘Nice to meet you.’ He said I am the first Chinese journalist he had ever seen.”

They took a photo together, and Wang returned to Beijing, where he published a piece in September, 2004, entitled “He Might Be The First American Black President.” He kept his recording of the speech and listened to it often enough that he can still recite lines. “My name is Obama. You might think it’s a strange name…” Wang began, still standing beside the coffee machines. …

A new short story by Yiyun Li:

He was raised by his mother alone, as she was by her father. She wondered if his mother, who had set up their date, had told him about that.

Siyu was thirty-eight, and the man, Hanfeng, was forty-four. Siyu’s father, after supporting her through college, had remarried, choosing a woman thirty years his junior. The woman had a young son from her previous marriage, whom Siyu’s father had taken on as his responsibility. The boy was now in his last year of high school, and Siyu, having told her father many times that he deserved peace and simplicity, maintained a respectful distance from his new family. Each year she spent New Year’s Eve, and sometimes other holidays, with Hanfeng’s mother, who had been her zoology professor in college. There was no way to predict when the older woman would be in the mood to invite Siyu, so she tried to keep herself uncommitted, which meant that most of the holidays she spent alone. …

Anthony Lane surveys the first week of the Olympics with an ambling wit:

“There was much wrangling, ahead of the festivities, over the quality of the air. In all honesty, though, the atmosphere is not that bad: recent analysis uncovered a quantitative ratio of eighty-five per cent nitrogen, ten per cent carbon dioxide, four per cent oxygen, and one per cent vichyssoise. On the first day of competition, I watched the cyclists pass through Tiananmen Square, near the start of their road race, and none of them seemed in danger of expiring. Logic suggested that they zip up the east side of the square, since they were heading that way anyhow, but politics demanded that they take the western route, and then hang a right. This allowed them to pass in a pretty blur beneath the portrait of Mao Zedong, who, having overseen the deaths of up to seventy million of his countrymen (and having earned a spot on their banknotes for his pains), was more than happy to survey a handful of fat-free Spaniards in red-and-yellow spandex. I watched the speeding procession in the company of the strapping Goss family, from Amsterdam, all of them rabid fans of volleyball. How did they rate the Dutch chances this year? ‘We have no volleyball team,’ Mr. Goss said, with infinite gloom. The Netherlands hadn’t qualified. The Gosses would have to make do with the beach equivalent, which is to proper volleyball what Elvis’s movies were to Elvis’s music. …”

Writer Evan Osnos answers questions about his New Yorker article “Angry Youth”:

“You’ve identified an important disconnect between Tang’s appetite for Western ideas and his own hypotheses for the roots of Western attitudes toward China. As he sees it, Westerners are brainwashed through education and media on issues such as Tibet and China’s human-rights record. Intellectually, he admires the skepticism of Western thinkers; it is one of the elements that attracted him to study them. But he gives less attention to dissident voices because, from where he sits, he doesn’t see the impact of their views on foreign attitudes toward China. His understanding of the mechanisms of Western public opinion is comparatively weak. When presented with a range of articles and photos that were, to his mind, flawed in similar ways, he imagined an unseen hand, an editorial conspiracy. (I spent much of our first conversations answering questions about the basic workings of a free press: the origin of story ideas, the role of editors, etc.)”

Some of China’s young nationalists are sounding like neoconservatives, and some like hard realists:

“Liu mentioned the famous photograph of an unknown man standing in front of a tank—perhaps the most provocative image in modern Chinese history.
‘We really acknowledge him. We really think he was brave,’ Liu told me. But, of that generation, he said, ‘They fought for China, to make the country better. And there were some faults of the government. But, finally, we must admit that the Chinese government had to use any way it could to put down that event.’
Sitting in the cool quiet of a California night, sipping his coffee, Liu said that he is not willing to risk all that his generation enjoys at home in order to hasten the liberties he has come to know in America. ‘Do you live on democracy?’ he asked me. ‘You eat bread, you drink coffee. All of these are not brought by democracy. Indian guys have democracy, and some African countries have democracy, but they can’t feed their own people.
‘Chinese people have begun to think, One part is the good life, another part is democracy,’ Liu went on. ‘If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But, without democracy, if we can still have the good life why should we choose democracy?’”

How America’s third richest man, Sheldon Adelson, got in on the ground floor of Macao gaming:

“In May, 2004, the first gamblers entered the Sands Macao. Its construction costs were two hundred and sixty-five million dollars, and Adelson made back his initial investment in a year. In December, 2004, Adelson took Las Vegas Sands public (according to Forbes, he owns sixty-nine per cent of the stock) and became a multibillionaire, overnight. The following year, Macao drew 10.5 million mainland Chinese visitors, a hundred and forty-seven per cent more than three years earlier—reflecting an easing of travel restrictions and an increase in the number of newly wealthy Chinese. By the end of 2006, Macao had become the top gambling center in the world, with gaming revenues exceeding $6.9 billion, a quarter of a billion dollars more than those on the Las Vegas Strip. In 2007, revenues climbed to $10.3 billion. That year, Adelson opened the $2.4-billion Venetian Macao—with canals and stripe-shirted gondoliers, as well as an extensive shopping mall and a five-hundred-and-forty-six-thousand-square-foot casino, which is the largest in the world. Since the Sands Macao opened, his personal wealth has multiplied more than fourteen times, and, according to the Times, in the two years after his company went public he earned roughly a million dollars an hour.”

“The whole house was like a swing.” Peter Hessler’s Peace Corps students report back from Sichuan province.