It was a striking sight. A blond-haired man waved a large red and white Danish flag among thousands of Chinese refugees ninety minutes from Nanjing. It was late 1937 and the Japanese army had just marched into Nanjing, without much resistance, and went on a spree of pillage, rape, and murder, the likes and scale of which had not been seen in the modern era.

Just a decade ago, before COVID upended everything, tens of thousands of migrants from African countries traveled to China in search of economic opportunity. One 2012 estimate put the African population in Guangzhou alone at 100,000. When the British-Nigerian travel writer Noo Saro-Wiwa heard about this community, she decided to travel to Guangzhou and China to learn more. She met traders, drug dealers, surgeons, visa over-stayers, former professional athletes, and many more trying to live, work and stay in China.

A family grocery store is the primary backdrop for Korean American writer Rosanna Young Oh’s debut poetry collection The Corrected Version: a backdrop refracted by memory and myth. Taken at face value, the grocery store—owned and run by Oh’s immigrant parents—represents the regular mundanity, tediousness and humiliation that accompanies the experience of starting over in America.

Sir Sam Cowan worked with Gurkha soldiers for many years in Nepal but also in Malaya, Singapore and Borneo, eventually becoming Colonel Commandment of the Brigade of Gurkhas and the Chairman of the Gurkha Welfare Trust. In this capacity he interacted with several of Nepal’s key players, including King Birendra and King Gyanendra. After retirement from the army, Cowan started researching and writing articles on Nepali history. This new book brings together a selection of his more popular and important articles in Maharajas, Emperors, Viceroys, Borders: Nepal’s relations North and South.

Impossible Speech: The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film, Christopher P Hanscom (Columbia University Press, March 2024)
Impossible Speech: The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film, Christopher P Hanscom (Columbia University Press, March 2024)

In what ways can or should art engage with its social context? Authors, readers, and critics have been preoccupied with this question since the dawn of modern literature in Korea. Advocates of social engagement have typically focused on realist texts, seeing such works as best suited to represent injustices and inequalities by describing them as if they were before our very eyes.

If Wong Kar-wai were to write a screenplay for a post-Handover story, along the same lines as his classic films set in the 1960s and 1990s, it might look like Sheung-King’s new novel, Batshit Seven. The pen name of author Aaron Tang, Sheung-King writes a raw and gritty story of a twenty-six year old called Glue—the amalgamation of Glen Wu—who has recently returned to Hong Kong after spending seven years in Toronto to studying acting at university and starting, but not finishing, an MFA in program in creative writing.