Click here for live webcast

Join co-editor Jeffrey Wasserstrom and various contributors to this provocative new book for a conversation challenging familiar media stereotypes of China. In Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land, some of the most talented and respected journalists and scholars writing about China today create a multifaceted portrait of a remarkable country undergoing extraordinary transformations by portraying the immense variety of lives that ordinary Chinese people are living. Speakers include: memoirist and fiction writer Xujun Eberlein; writer and photographer Howard French; journalist and translator Megan Shank; and media commentator, professor, and Asia Society fellow Jeffrey Wasserstrom. Followed by a book sale and signing.

Read an excerpt

"The essays cover a panoply of issues facing modern China, and the book's combination of scope and intimacy is central to its achievement." — Publishers Weekly

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chair of the History Department at the University of California, Irvine. He is also an Editor of Journal of Asian Studies; a co-founder of and contributing editor to "The China Beat"; and an Associate Fellow at Asia Society. He is the author of China’s Brave New World: And Other Tales for Global Times, and a regular contributor to academic journals.

Xujun Eberlein grew up in Chongqing, China, and holds a PhD from MIT. Her story collection, Apologies Forthcoming, won the 2007 Tartt Fiction Award. Other recent honors include a 2008 artist fellowship in fiction/creative nonfiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a 2007 Goldfarb Nonfiction Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ledge 2007 Fiction Award, and second prize in Literal Latte’s Essay Awards.

Howard French is a journalist, photographer, author of Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life (with Qiu Xiaolong), and of a forthcoming book about China's relationship with Africa to be published by Knopf in 2013.

Megan Shank is a freelance writer and Chinese-language translator whose work has appeared in Newsweek International, The Daily Beast, Ms., Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, Miller-McCuneM, Archaeology, The San Antonio Express-News, CNN.com, The South China Morning Post, The American Lawyer and Global Journalist, among others. Shank currently serves as managing editor for East View Information Service’s The Current Digest of the Chinese Press.

Can’t make it to this program? Tune in to AsiaSociety.org/NYlive at 6:30 pm ET for a free live video webcast. Viewers are encouraged to submit questions to moderator@asiasociety.org.