Author Archives: Baobao Zhang

In high school, when my classmates were fixated on Kerouac & Co., I desperately tried to imitate the history-inspired poetry of Robert Penn Warren.

For those in the counterinsurgency, it’s a bad time for public relations.

Last Saturday evening, I hosted a dinner party. I wanted it to be the perfect dinner party. Long before I sent out the invitations, I fastidiously planned for a three-course meal. While many budding young chefs turn to the Internet for recipes, I sought out a more authoritative source. During the summer, I discovered the »

This summer, my mom gave me the talk. I was eating frozen yogurt on the couch when she popped the question: “What are you going to do after Yale?” Her tone frightened me. My mom and I had discussed post-graduation plans before, but always in casual conversations. Usually, I parried her questions with a vaguely »

One hundred years ago, Owen Johnson’s novel “Stover at Yale” was published. An American version of “Tom Brown at Oxford,” the book recounts Dink Stover’s transition from the Lawrenceville School to Old Campus. As expected, his classmates, professors, and coaches groomed him into the Yale gentleman — a class leader, a football star and a »

This reading week, George F. Kennan won’t be far from my mind. “George who?” my friends ask. Some with blank stares. Some reaching into their distant memory of AP U.S. History. Maybe Henry Kissinger is right: our generation has largely forgotten about Kennan, the diplomat who introduced the theory of containment during the Cold War. »

At one point, film director Stephen Gyllenhaal (“Waterland,” “A Dangerous Woman,” “Losing Isaiah”) chose wrestling over Yale. His latest movie production, “Grassroots,” about two slackers running for office in Seattle, Wash., will premiere at the Whitney Humanities Center today at 7 p.m. WEEKEND managed to only mention his children once, tangentially. Q. Your latest film, »

The policeman inched towards me with a cold, methodical gaze. “Do you have a CCTV license?” he asked. I clutched my video camera and shook my head. “Do you want to get arrested?” he said in a flat voice. “I don’t want to cause any trouble.” “Leave now or I would have to take you »

A young man came into the narrow print shop with a 300-page book in his hand. “How much does it cost for you to copy it for me?” he said. “I’ll pick it up in the afternoon.” After punching some numbers into a calculator, the shop owner asked for 30 RMB (around $4.57) and tossed »

In 1991, Fred Strebeigh, who now teaches non-fiction writing at Yale, wrote about how students and citizens used bicycles to mobilize for the Tiananmen Square protests. He described China as “a country with only a few thousand privately-owned cars but some 220 million cycles.” So much has changed in the country since then. Last Friday, »

Showbiz might seem like the natural career choice for the former child star who played Cosette in a 1994 Broadway rendition of “Les Misérables.” But creative writing is Eliza Clark’s ’07 true calling. A theater studies major who participated in the Yale Playwrights Festival three years in a row and wrote four plays in college, »

I once told my friend that I would send my future kids to boarding school. “You’re a sadist,” my friend said. Maybe I am. Or maybe it’s the Chinese “mother tiger” instinct in me, so aptly described by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua in her essay in the Jan. 7 issue of the Wall »