China is rapidly growing wealthy with its economic might. The shabby "luxury" bathhouses of present-day Beijing are now genuine erotic utopias surpassing anything the ancient Romans ever dreamed up in their great baths. China is also rapidly taking over large parts of the world, including the USA, at first outsourcing the running of the country to Americans, later directly taking over operations, as it grows more powerful and the US more oppressed.

Meanwhile the nonsense decorative English that appears on t-shirts and other casual paraphernalia in China is discovered to contain the code Isham needs to break free of his enslavement in the fissure between time and space and return to the present. Cracking a code that defies any known logic requires not deciphering it but deriving an original theory to explain it. With a crash course on semiotics he begins to penetrate the code but not in time to avoid being hurled to the endgame, a future America of horror, now a slave colony, and with no way out.

RENROU: THE KITCHENS OF CANTON. A novel (planned). "Renrou" is the Chinese word for human flesh, the subject of this sequel to Isham Cook's second novel "Xiyu" (in progress) and the third in this series. Here the term is employed in the wholly literal sense of "human meat." China has taken over large swaths of the world, including all of the Americas (now American Special Administrative Region or AMSAR) and Africa (African Special Administrative Region or AFSAR), which have been turned into vast slave colonies, their former nation states dissolved. China is now the richest and most opulent nation the world has ever known.

Our familiar protagonist Isham Cook, haplessly teleported into the future, has been apprehended as an escaped slave, even as his lack of embedded electronic identification utterly flabbergasts the authorities. Captured slaves forfeit their right to life and are shipped in barges to China to be processed as food for the culinary establishments of Canton (formerly Guangzhou), now the most advanced gastronomical center in the world, where cuisine is the national art form and human flesh in particular the most prized of meats. They make no bones about it: the Confucian canon, restored to its rightful place as the only suitable ethical system for China, has a place for slaves too on the dinner plate in the intricately class-based society of future China.

The novel is narrated during Isham's sea journey to Canton as he contemplates his curious if highly unpleasant fate, while being steadily fattened up and massaged for the purpose of tenderizing his flesh.

"Questioning China's '5,000 years' master trope" - on China's secondary school propaganda machine

"A modest proposal regarding sex work" - a satirical piece on why all sex should be paid for

"A Shakespeare sex-and-violence starter kit" - the real reason Shakespeare's audience was susceptible to a belief in ghosts (it's not the supernatural)

"On harpsichords and multicolored pianos: The challenge of music in China" - the problem with the Chinese pianist Lang Lang and others like him

"Theatrics of Japanese Noh, Kabuki, and the mixed-bathing Onsen" - what Japanese theater and nude mix-bathing hot springs have in common

"The Chinese-Japanese cultural chasm on display at Starbucks" - why Starbucks is a perfect venue for cross-cultural observation

"From struggle sessions to public dressing-downs: China's continuity of psychological control" - how China keeps all of its workers in line, including white-collar workers and professionals