After i’d been traveling for two-and-a-half weeks, i really needed to have my fingernails cut, so i walked a couple of blocks in Vientiane, Laos into the nearest hairstylist. She did my fingernails and cleaned up my feet, which had been in flip-flops for 16 hours a day. Those lavender flip-flops were already brown with dust, so perhaps you can imagine my feet.

The Vientiane hairstylist had lived in Philadelphia for 7 years, so she told me all about the politics of her country (sound familiar?), but more particularly about China. “How can a country like that become powerful? The way it treats its people!”

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