Amma and Baba had met several years before they were grudgingly allowed to marry. (Or at least that is what we had been told.) In 1978, Baba traveled with a group of friends from the coastal city of Karachi northwards by train and by bus to Swat where the moustachioed Imran, a fellow student, had his family home in Mingora. Imran, like Baba, was completing his B.Com that year and planned to return to Swat to manage the Pine Cone Inn, a ramshackle guesthouse that his father owned in nearby Kalam. Presenting it as a reconnoitering expedition, a ‘case study’ for his fellow classmates to solve, Imran persuaded his father to allow the six of them to spend a few weeks at the Inn and use their recently acquired knowledge of business models to turn it into a profitable enterprise.
Category Archive: Excerpts
The rise of China in the wake of the slow relative decline of the United States has been the overarching narrative of global studies since the beginning of this century. Is this narrative correct? China’s growth is slowing as it reaches middle income status and the United States is still overwhelmingly more wealthy and powerful than China. If China will someday “overtake” the United States, it will not happen for decades or centuries, depending what is meant by overtaking. But even this more guarded account of US decline is colored by an outdated, state-centric view of human society. The twenty-first century world-system is centered on the United States but not contained within it; individuals all over the world participate in hierarchies of distinction that are fundamentally American in ideology and orientation. Whether or not they agree with US policy, support the US president, or are even able to enter the United States, success-oriented individuals choose to live in an American world—or accept global social exclusion. This is just as true in China as anywhere else, and perhaps even more true for Chinese individuals than for anyone else.
It’s 2017, and Wonder Woman is about to make her big screen debut. Fearless, mighty girl-heroes such as Rey, Jyn Erso, and Katniss Everdeen take centre-stage in the film-going public’s imagination.
It is time to reclaim the hero story with an empowered feminine lens. Girls’ Adventure Stories of Long Ago is both a tribute, and a wake-up call. A poetic re-imaging of Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, my second collection explores ancient and modern landscapes, love lost and rediscovered; adventures undertaken and obstacles overcome.
Chinatown Sonnets is a sonnet sequence that updates the age-old idea of East meets West in which West fetishizes East, Hong Kong emulates Paris, Mong Kok is the “Times Square of Asia”, and primetime television in Hong Kong rivals American soap operas in upper class drama.
I feel the idea of displacement is central to Louder than Hearts—displacement from the land, from home, from memory, and from one’s mother language. The book is dedicated “To our broken languages & our broken cities,” but I wanted to find song and celebration too, inside the brokenness.
A couple of thousand years ago, or even longer depending on which book you read, the Mosuos, originally known as the Na people, walked from the high mountains in the north-west to where they are today, in search of a kinder climate. They must have trekked for years and years, passing over countless harsh mountain ranges before coming across a great plateau situated in a lower altitude, much more hospitable than their previous homeland.
All over the islands, breech babies grew up to become valuable members of any community—for their reputed skill in easing out fishbones stuck in one’s throat.
All her life, Purificacion was called upon to conduct the task, just because she was delivered feet first.
Occasionally, in the middle of the night, the caterwauling in Barrio Ejemplo in the town of Asingan would abruptly die down, and the folks knew the men had just declared a cessation of streetcorner intoxication because of a little accident.
Mang Kardo, a thin, wiry man with a squeaky but often loud voice, had done it again, orated while carelessly wolfing down roasted milkfish. Now he had to stop from his perorations, shake and quiver as he rose from a wooden bench, and attempt to harrumph in his screechy manner, again and again, until Big Boy Reynoso pulled up his bulk from the bench across, strode over and gave poor Kardo a mighty whack on the back.