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If you followed American media in recent years, you might have thought China was taking over the planet. Recent titles at the book store have included Becoming China's Bitch and When China Rules the World.

"They are the world's superpower or soon will be," Glenn Beck used to intone on Fox News. "They always thought America was just a blip."

And when the city of Philadelphia postponed an Eagles football game a couple of years ago because of a blizzard forecast, then-Gov. Ed Rendell said America — unlike China — was becoming a nation of "wussies."

"If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game?" Rendell asked. "People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down."

But China always looks more impressive from afar than it does close up.

The government in Beijing is targeting the economy to grow at 7.5 percent this year – well below the nearly 10.5 percent average growth of the previous decade.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has rung Wall Street back to business.

Traffic is snarled, subways out of commission, streets flooded and power out for many parts of the city, but the New York Stock Exchange opened without hitch Wednesday after an historic two-day shutdown, courtesy of Hurricane Sandy.

Bloomberg rang the opening bell at 9:30 a.m., right on schedule, as stock traders cheered from the iconic trading floor below, rumored to be flooded, but dry Wednesday morning, and festive.

The market got off to a good start after the shutdown.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 74 points to 13,182 shortly after the opening bell.

The exchange is running on backup generators since power is nonexistent in large parts of downtown Manhattan.

The last time the exchange was closed for two days due to weather was in 1888.

The Two-Way

Keeping Sandy's Economic Impact In Perspective

Not so long ago, many Chinese commentators wrote in a cautious, oblique style designed not to offend the nation's famously humorless leaders — then came the Internet, blogs and a cheeky young man named Han Han.

The voice of China's post-'80s generation, Han is ironic, skeptical and blunt — writing what many young Chinese think but dare not say publicly.

Now 30 years old, Han has boy-band good looks, drives race cars and has 8 million followers on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

A collection of his satiric essays is out this month for the first time in English. It's called This Generation: Dispatches From China's Most Popular Literary Star (and Race Car Driver).

Han aims his sarcastic barbs at a wide range of targets in Chinese government and society, from the state education system:

— "I participated in quite a few essay competitions. Before each event, I had to first brainwash myself and check to see what slogans were in fashion."

To the rule of law:

— "We learned that the first article of the Constitution is: 'If we say you're guilty, you're guilty.' "

And the growing gap between the rulers and the ruled:

— "The main contradiction in China today is between the growing intelligence of the population and rapidly waning morality of our officials."

Enlarge Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

Blogger and race car driver Han Han doesn't shy away from skewering Chinese government and society.

Author Richard Russo has been writing about the burned-out mill town of Gloversville, N.Y., for years. In one Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, he called it Empire Falls; in another novel, it was Thomaston.

Now, Russo has turned his attention to the real Gloversville and his experiences growing up there. His new memoir, Elsewhere, tracks his relationship with a very intense and neurotic mother who was also a gallant single mom. Russo and his mother remained close even through those transitions when children usually begin to separate from their parents, like going away to college. Of his own decision to attend the University of Arizona, Russo writes:

"I expected my mother to put up stiff resistance to this plan; after all, I'd be twenty-five hundred miles away and her mantra had always been that we were a team, that as long as we had each other, we'd be able to manage. So I should have been suspicious when she didn't object to my heading west. But even if I'd twigged to the possibility that she was up to something, I never would've grasped the obvious inference, and it was years before it occurred to me that maybe the westward-ho notion hadn't been mine at all, that she'd steadily been dropping hints — for example, that the best place to study archeology, my current interest, was the Desert Southwest — and that I'd dutifully been lapping them up. Nor did she object when, in the spring of my senior year I announced I wanted to buy a car.

"The reason she didn't, of course, was that we'd need one. Because she was coming with me."