Michael Meyer first went to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps. As the author of the acclaimed The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, he received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also won a Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers. Meyer’s stories have appeared in The New York Times, Time, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and on This American Life. Meyer teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh and spends the off-season in Singapore. His newest book, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, will be published on February 17, 2015.
Beijing, as most Chinese know it, was a neglected relic after the Japanese occupation of World War II and the Chinese Civil War. In 1949, when the victorious communists moved the capital back there from Nanjing, it was a bankrupt town of 1.4 million people; almost nothing of any consequence was made or manufactured there. But the path to the...