Mahlon Meyer

When we enter the cell in Bilibid Prison, a group of inmates suddenly disperses. They had been hunching over something. We now see it is what seems to be a little girl dressed in scanty garments.

Last month I set off with my father to drive from his home in Indiana down to Oxford, Mississippi, where the great writer William Faulkner had lived. I had been reading Faulkner for more than a decade in the remoteness of Asia, but I had never been to the South and had no idea what it looked like.

There's more than one way to appreciate a tree. On a recent Saturday morning, as he leads 25 parents and schoolchildren along a street next to Taipei's Ta-An Forest Park, Jerome Su stops before a flowering sweet-gum tree.

As night falls over the working-class district of Yau Ma Tei in Hong Kong, the bustling streets become silent and murky. Inside a second-floor tenement, two dozen Falun Gong practitioners sit closely together, chanting from their handbooks.

When the doors open at 6 p.m., a mass of students rushes into the arena. As the small hall on the outskirts of Taipei fills up, shouts rise up from the crowd: "A-mei!

Harun Bin Shaari is shadow-boxing, awaiting his turn in the ring. The 22-year-old Malaysian kickboxer feigns a look of toughness--but his match is approaching and he can't help noticing the young boy who fared poorly in the previous contest.

Disgusted by his frail condition, Yip Kai-foon pinches his legs, which hang limply in a wheelchair. They are nearly as thin as reeds. Yip, 37, was once Hong Kong's most feared gangster.

Duan Rongzhi, the chief detective in Fengjie County, Sichuan, is no Sherlock Holmes. The stocky, hard-drinking 38-year-old veteran police officer wears a leather jacket, has a silver tooth and walks with a swagger, especially after several rounds of beer.

It is almost dusk on the banks of the Yangtze River in lower Sichuan Province. But a team of local archeologists, excavating a ninth-century stone house, is working feverishly.

In his final days, legendary museum curator Chuang Yen had become something of a relic himself. He smoked an ornate pipe, and wore Confucian robes long after they went out of style.

Clutching a towel to his bloody scalp, an inmate staggers down a corridor of the Macau Central Prison. He gropes at the wall with his free hand and sways forward.

GERHAD PASIMOS TAKES OFF HIS rumpled green cap and clenches it in his hands. His unwashed hair sticks straight up, testament to the weeks he has lived in a makeshift refugee camp on the northern coast of East Timor.