i b e c h i n g

The Palestinian Archipelago by Julien Bousac

STS-129, launching tomorrow.

The completion of this mission will leave five space shuttle flights remaining until the end of the program.

President Obama’s arrival in China on Sunday is being eagerly awaited by many people, especially one young woman in Shanghai. Lou Jing is of mixed race, with a Chinese mother and an African-American father. She became famous nationally after her participation in an American Idol-type program.

For Lou, the reality television show turned out to be a lesson in brutal reality. The talent contest is called Go! Oriental Angel, and the 20-year-old made it through preliminary rounds to become one of 30 contestants.

Lou is studying for a degree in television anchoring at Shanghai’s prestigious Theater Academy, and her teachers thought it would be a good opportunity. But from the very first, the focus was on her skin color.

Introducing Lou, the host said, “her chocolate-colored skin lights up her sunny character.” In a short yellow satin frock, Lou launched into a rap she had written to introduce herself to the audience. They were shocked by her perfect Shanghainese and Mandarin. In retrospect, this moment probably marked the end of Lou’s innocence — and the start of a process of questioning her own identity.

“When I was young, I didn’t really know I was different from other people,” she says. “It was only after entering the competition that I realized I was different from others.”

The show drew attention to her background, which is very unusual for China. She was raised in a single-parent family by her Shanghainese mother, who is a teacher. Her African-American father, whom she has never met, returned to the United States without even knowing he had conceived a child in China.

In her two months on air, Lou was nicknamed the “Chocolate Angel” and the “Black Pearl” by the media. She wasn’t bothered by these names, she says.

But online, the poison pens were venomous. Chinese posting messages on the Web criticized her skin color as “gross” and “ugly”; they called her shameless for appearing on television. The worst insults were reserved for her mother for having had a relationship with an African-American out of wedlock.

There were online statements of support as well, but the verbal attacks stunned Lou. “I looked at the posts and I cried. Then I didn’t look at them anymore. I decided I would do my best to go abroad to study.”

Her dream is of escape. She wants to study journalism at Columbia University. She believes the lack of knowledge about racism in China is such that many people didn’t even realize their comments were discriminatory or hurtful. But for her, the world suddenly seems a different place.

“Before, on the street, people might say things like, ‘How come she looks like that?’ But that was just a small number of people. When I was younger, I thought life was beautiful. Why is it that now I’ve grown up, I don’t think that anymore?” she says.

DJ Lady Kate maintains a secret identity as pastry chef Kate Steffens, who blogs about her rock ‘n roll cakes at Straight Outta Chocolate.

One afternoon in March 2007, Jack Daws stepped up to a newsstand in Los Angeles International Airport with a handful of change, including a counterfeit penny made of 18-karat gold that Mr. Daws, a Seattle artist, had fashioned. He carefully put the counterfeit penny, dated 1970, down on the counter, counted out enough change to pay $11.90 for a Hustler magazine and left.

He got a cup of coffee and sat down on a seat with the newsstand in sight, and watched for an hour wondering if any of the travelers had walked off with his golden penny and where it would end up at the end of the day.

Most counterfeiting takes something that is nearly worthless and turns it into something perceived to have value. Mr. Daws did just the opposite. He took value — approximately $100 worth of gold — and turned it into something perceived as nearly worthless, one cent. “It’s there, but if people don’t realize it, it’s the same as not being there,” he said. Of the 11 copper-plated gold pennies he made as part of his series, only this one was sent into the wider world.

He never expected to see it again, but he wondered where the penny ended up: stuck in a giant penny jar, melted down with other coins back at the United States Mint, lost in a street gutter. Meanwhile, one of his other counterfeit pennies sold for $1,000 to a collector through the Greg Kucera gallery.

Then, Mr. Daws woke up one morning in October and listened to a voicemail left by a Brooklyn graphic designer named Jessica Reed.

“I think I found your gold penny,” the message said.

How the golden penny traveled, through how many hands or cash registers, over the two years, may never be known. But now the journey has reached its endpoint.

Late this summer, when Ms. Reed was paying for groceries at the C-Town supermarket in Greenpoint, she noticed the penny because the gold color had started to peek through. A fan of unusual coins, she slipped it back into her change purse and tucked it into the recesses of her mind.

Then recently, while doing research about a 1924 Mercury-head dime, she remembered the penny and typed “gold penny” into Google, which returned information on science experiments to give a penny a gold color. She added “1970” and found an item about how Mr. Daws had put a 18-karat gold penny, dated 1970 with no mint mark, into circulation. It was heavier and smaller than a real penny.

In disbelief, she weighed the penny on a digital scale. It came in at three grams, one gram more than similar pennies from 1970. And it was slightly smaller than a normal penny, owing to the shrinking after the casting process.

She traced Mr. Daws’s phone number through the gallery and left him the message. When he called back, he knew it had to be his penny as soon as she described it to him.

Ms. Reed will keep the coin. She is thinking of having it framed. It’s was a curious way to display a sculpture, she said. “I can’t imagine being an artist who does something like this,” she said. “It’s the opposite of having your stuff shown in a gallery. It could be tossed.”