Introduction

This set of postings makes up the on-going Far East travelogue that began in the Summer of 2002 when I headed out for Taiwan to study Mandarin as a Boren Fellow under the National Security Education Program (NSEP). That is nfollowed by the mainland China posts from my Fulbright year in 2004-2005.

The posts are over to the side, and can be read in any order, though there is something to be said for longitudinal consistency in tracking the narrative.