Today I received an email from Yao Yao, one of the Chinese friends I met while visiting the “small city” of Loudi, population 4 million, in 2008.  It’s a strange reality three and a half years later, that I may so casually return to Nowheresville, China to run around with some very old friends in a place with a two-story Walmart but no white people. It makes me think of when this all started during the spring of 2007.  A fifteen-year-old me was probably watching some crappy MTV reality TV show [...]