麻豆社

Huan Hsu鈥檚 new book, The Porcelain Thief, documents his travels through China in search of his family鈥檚 lost porcelain collection.聽 In 1938, when the Japanese arrived in Huan Hsu鈥檚 great-great-grandfather Liu's hometown Xingang, Liu was forced to bury his priceless antique pots. Seven decades on Huan embarks on a quest to find them. 聽Huan's award-winning essays and fiction have appeared in Slate, The Literary Review, Seattle Weekly and Washington City Paper. He teaches creative writing at Amsterdam University College.

Claire Curneen is an Irish ceramic artist and a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Curneen鈥檚 work can be seen in over 20 public collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff; Taipei Ceramics Museum, Taiwan and the Crafts Council, London.

And you can see some of Claire's work in the gallery on the right-hand side of this page.

Dr. Tim Jones is Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences, Cardiff University with a special interest in particulate pollution and human health. Specific particles of interest are geologically-sourced such as, volcanic ash, desert storm dust, and quarry dust. One focus of his research is podoconiosis, a serious form of clay-induced elephantiasis, thought to affect about 4 million people in high-altitude tropical regions.聽

Huan Hsu contends that the biggest health risk in China today is probably crossing the street because Chinese drivers tend to be reckless: despite having a fraction of the automobiles as America, China suffers many times the number of the traffic fatalities. Rather than yield to pedestrians or cyclists, the Chinese simply make liberal use of their horns and expect people to give way, leading to a joke that the car horn is the Chinese brake pedal. So Huan proposes that we actually make the brake pedal the car horn. Now, drivers can't honk unless they slow down (or must slow down to honk) which solves both problems.聽