A Danish prince haunted by his father's ghost. A delusional Spanish knight jousting with windmills. A Chinese beauty falling into an enchanted dream next to a Peony Pavilion.
It takes about 20 Chinese parents, 11 elementary schools throughout the Bay Area and a small army of volunteers to stage the series of celebrations planned for the upcoming Chinese New Year, or the Lunar New Year, which will fall on Jan 28.
The one thing that all of the 3,600 exhibitors' products now at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas have in common is that they all need electricity.
This holiday season was a little hectic for me as I was hosting three family friends from China. Entrepreneurs, scholars and physicians, no matter what the parents do for a living, they share something in common: They've sent their teenagers to boarding schools in the US.
New Year's Eve is a heady time in New York City, as anyone who has watched the ball drop can attest, even if it is experienced vicariously on TV going back to the 1970s days of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve.
Mark MacDonald, a FedEx deliveryman and volunteer fireman in rural Maryland, was out with his father last September looking for ginseng roots in western Allegany County.
What if you flew all the way from China and now were in Napa Valley, California, or Mount Sierra, Nevada?
College protests have been in the news a lot this year, with "safe spaces", Halloween costumes and professors' "microaggressions" some of the flashpoints. But a more piquant issue has emerged from the dining halls of Oberlin College in Ohio.
Living in California, the Golden State, which has one of the highest densities of Chinese people and is known as "the Gateway to Asia", I probably have more opportunities to observe how the world's two biggest economies intertwine and are interdependent in many ways, for example, deep-pocketed Chinese's craving for top American brands and properties.
Visiting the United States for the first time in 1993, I was deeply impressed by how rich, vibrant and advanced the country was. At the same time, I was appalled by the huge numbers of homeless people on the streets of big cities such as New York, Washington, San Francisco and even Honolulu.
An editor and writer at China Daily USA in New York, William Hennelly is a print and digital media veteran. He previously was managing editor of TheStreet.com financial news website in New York, and has worked at daily newspapers in New Jersey. Hennelly is a journalism graduate of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
General manager of China Daily USA's San Francisco bureau. Based in the Bay Area, she covers a wide range of topics including corporate news, Silicon Valley innovation, US-China cooperation in various forms and profiles of interesting personalities, as well as overseeing office operations.
Chen Weihua is the Chief Washington Correspondent of China Daily and Deputy Editor of China Daily USA. He is also a columnist, with a particular focus on US politics and US-China relations.
A copy editor and writer with China Daily USA in New York, Chris Davis is a graduate of the University of Virginia and served two years as a volunteer with the United States Peace Corps in Kenya.