The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Generally, "ations" are regarded as good things. Propagation, masturbation, fornication, copulation, lubrication - all activities mankind finds to be worthy efforts. However words containing this benevolent suffix are have recently been besmirched by the smear campaign being waged against one of their brethren.

The world's attention is currently focused on the 130 day

Jim Harkness never expected to return to Minnesota. A native of South Minneapolis who studied Chinese in high school, he started his career as an activist specializing in Asian birds, then giant pandas. His work took him to China often, and eventually he became a full-time resident of Beijing, working first with the Ford Foundation, then serving as executive director of World Wildlife Fund China.

We’re sitting at a table in Rice Paper, the little Asian-fusion restaurant in Linden Hills.

As you walk down the narrow hallway into Frank Sander's sunlit studio in Lowertown you're greeted by an entryway table piled with cables, cast-off camera bits, miscellaneous video equipment, and a couple of discarded microphone heads.

Bed 31 is covered with a thin white blanket, awaiting the post-surgery arrival of Deng Yilian, 52, native of tiny Malu in southwest China’s Hunan Province. To the left, on Bed 30, Deng’s daughter Cotton, 29, now of Shanghai, is seated, legs crossed; to the right, on a bed inexplicably labeled 31+, her son Mondy, 27 and also of Shanghai, is lying down.

Viewed from room 1238 of the White Swan Hotel, the jagged ten-story tenements of Guangzhou, China, are softened by smog. Below, the United States Consulate complex sprawls beside century-old British colonial structures. “Pretty good view, isn’t it?” asks Paul Stueber, an earnest forty-four-year-old drum instructor from Minneapolis. He packs a baby bottle into a blue backpack. Beside him, his wife, Laurel, a forty-year-old schoolteacher, holds their newly adopted daughter, Olivia Ya Qun Stueber, age approximately fourteen months.