Debra Bruno is a Beijing-based freelance writer who regularly writes for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor about topics ranging from Beijing opera to China’s shale gas projects. Before moving to China in 2011, she lived in Washington, D.C., and has worked for Roll Call, Legal Times, and Moment Magazine. For almost twenty years, she taught writing at George Washington University. In her blog, www.notbyoccident.blogspot.com, she writes about smuggling her cat into China, mastering mahjong, and the hazards of getting her hair colored in China.
The Chinese poets grouped together as the “Nine Leaves” school were once considered the country’s most avant-garde, a marked contrast to the propagandistic writing that became common during Mao’s reign.Nine Leaves’ last living member, Zheng Min, stopped writing along with the other poets in the 1950s after she returned from a sojourn in the U.S...