A National Geographic reporter, in 2015: “‘Where is everybody?’ That was my reaction almost every time I stepped inside a tulou. In places built to hold hundreds of people, often only five ...
https://blog.christhedunn.com/2019/10/17/analog-homelandcoming-masterpiece/
Our morning tour was cut short when we were summoned to breakfast, another table heavy with hot and hearty dishes. After we couldn’t eat another bite, it was time to take tea. We soon learned t...
https://blog.christhedunn.com/2019/10/12/analog-homelandcoming-post-breakfast-tea/
My grandmother’s grandfather built the «tulou» at a cost of 80,000 silver dollars in 1912. My great-great-grandfather, who was of the 21st generation in his clan, made his fortune with his b...
https://blog.christhedunn.com/2019/10/11/analog-homelandcoming-our-forebears/
As we explored the «tulou» on our first morning, we encountered the man whom my Uncle Doug called “the Proprietor” — the eldest in our branch of the family, and therefore the head of the ...
Thanks to jet lag, roosters cawing every two hours of the night, our continued awe of actually being in my grandmother’s ancestral village, and a sense of urgency to soak it all in before the d...
The «tulou» my grandmother’s grandfather built is one of about 3,000 that remain in Fujian. Wrote a New York Times reporter in 2008: “Feng shui correct, the compounds have withstood bullets...
First, we flew halfway around the world to meet my grandmother in Taiwan. Then, all together, she and my husband, my uncles, and I left her Taipei high-rise to take a cab to take a flight to the ...
https://blog.christhedunn.com/2019/09/25/analog-homelandcoming-arrival/
Living in Houston again, among family and friends and old haunts, I’ve been thinking a lot about home. Coincidentally, The Wangs vs. the World — one of five novels by different female Chine...
If you’re driving down the two-lane highway that’s the only paved road in New Zealand’s Fiordland National Park, you can have only one destination — after all, the highway ends at Milford...
https://blog.christhedunn.com/2018/03/13/analog-milford-sound-new-zealand/
Of New Zealand’s 14 national parks, Fiordland National Park is the largest, arguably the most isolated and perhaps the least touched by humans. It’s stunning. A single, two-lane highway runs ...
https://blog.christhedunn.com/2018/02/19/analog-fiordland-national-park-new-zealand/