Born and raised in Beijing, Bei Dao spent decades in exile in Europe because of his alleged involvement in the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. City Gate, Open Up is his eloquent, moving memoir in which the foremost Chinese poet rebuilds Beijing, his fond hometown and lifelong anchor, through poignant memories and portraits, rendering the generations who have lived through such surreal, turbulent times.
The Opium Wars are probably the only actual shooting wars in history that are named after a drug. They may be the only major wars between countries that are named after a commodity of any kind. Britain and Iceland had their cod war, but that hardly counts. The United States had a Whiskey Rebellion and Australia had a Rum Rebellion. France and Mexico fought a desultory Pastry War in 1838 that cost Santa Anna his left leg and catapulted the rest of him to dictatorship. But the Opium Wars set the trajectory of the East Asian interstate system for 100 years and resonate in historical memory to this day.
Kevin Kwan is a Singaporean relocated to New York, and Rich People Problems is the third of his rollicking romps of money and status in Asia. The first, Crazy Rich Asians, a brilliant title, and a brilliant idea, was a smash-hit success. It is currently being made into a movie which seems certain to be a riot. The three novels follow a core cast of characters, but each can be read as a stand-alone title.
Clearly targeting a female audience, this epic of love and sedition nevertheless offers far more than the average chick-lit romance with its carefully investigated and balanced view of the struggle for Indian independence in the years before and during World War II.
“Once you have decided to have your photograph taken,” Matsuzaki Shinji wrote in 1886, “you should clean your entire person, comb your hair, shave your face (while those with long beards should wash them thoroughly), and take care that no dirt is attached to the face or the rest of your body.” He followed this up with twenty-five more “dos and don’ts” for the customer.
The “Asia Rising” story has been written and reported about so often that it has almost come to be accepted as truth. Driven by the rise of China and more recently, that of India and Southeast Asia, the combination of massive populations, rising economies and rapid modernization means Asia is set to become the new center of the world. Even China’s recent economic slowdown has not prevented Asia bulls from maintaining their positive forecasts. Scholar and academic Michael Auslin provides a rare voice of dissent with The End of the Asian Century.
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.