Poorly pasted together and full of pixelated photographs, my Myanmar Lonely Planet has been following me forlornly ever since I picked it up some four years ago from a child book hawker in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Besides my China LP (covered in brown paper to hide its entry from Chinese customs), it stood alone on …
Author: Justin Calderón
Justin Calderón is the founder of Mint Position, an SEO-focused content marketing agency that produces and ranks web content using journalistic-quality research. He is also a veteran journalist, and his byline has appeared in the BBC, CNN, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, GlobalPost, the Bangkok Post and more. Justin speaks Mandarin and Spanish.
Why support Taiwan? The heartbeat of free markets is one reason
During a recent jaunt to Taiwan, I found myself waking up to the busy sounds of a day market in Nanshijiao, Taipei. The combined cacophony of chattering neighbors, honking motorbikes and not-so-delicate pounds of metal on pig flesh were to be my alarm clock for the duration of the stay. While Taiwan is known for …
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Who are the waitresses at Pyongyang restaurants in Shanghai?
Recently I've been fixated with totalitarian regimes, and it's beginning to show in my work. Today I published a piece titled "The odd reality behind Shanghai's Pyongyang restaurants" for CNNGo in which I discovered that waitresses of the three North Korean-government run Pyongyang restaurants in Shanghai have no clue of each others' existence. Like the …
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Book Review: Nothing to Envy
North Korea has always been an alluring topic to me. It's the mystery, I suppose; that lingering curiosity of wanting to peek into a land frozen in time, barred from the outside world, especially for Americans to say the least. Demick's book Nothing to Envy peels that mystery away and reveals what most already suspected …
Reading Chinese: Reproductive Organs 生殖器
Reproductive Organs Simplified/Traditional: 生殖器 Pinyin： shēngzhíqì Brief: Sex education has recently become a trendy topic across China, and though school teachers and the education officials they answer to get an 'A' for effort, their application of the program seems to miss the mark. A photo essay in WantChinaTimes outlines the adventurous approach that has been …
Justin Calderón 