At a May meeting of the Ypsilanti City Council, Amy Xue Foster — a Chinese-born, Troy-based businesswoman — proposed an ambitious project to construct a glittering high-end apartment complex on a patch of dilapidated industrial land. To be dubbed “International Village,” the complex would sport distinctly East-Asian architectural decor and target well-to-do Asian nationals attending Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan or working in automotive research.

My mother would often express a desire to move to the West Coast when she retired.

In Seattle, or perhaps San Francisco, the winters are milder, the cities livelier and there are more native Chinese speakers for her than in our Detroit suburb. To her, Michigan winters are too long, the suburban sprawl of southeast Michigan too quiet and the options for quality Chinese food too limiting.

These places beckoned to her because they resembled — culturally and physically — where she had grown up: A bustling city nestled in Southern China.

The market trends ending The Ann Arbor News were hardly confined to Ann Arbor. Until the advent of the Internet, most medium-sized cities could support at least one independent daily print publication that could reap healthy profit margins by holding a de-facto monopoly on local classified ad sales.

For seven years, Ypsilanti resident Sultan was an interpreter for American troops deployed in Afghanistan. Wearing an American uniform and carrying a rifle, Sultan was away from his home in north Afghanistan for extended periods of time, traveling the country with American combat soldiers to translate and help train local forces and often being subjected to hostile ambushes on the road.