After much of the western world let go of its colonies in the years following World War II, the United States did the opposite in Guam: it not only re-occupied the island, but established a (massive) military base there. The culture in Guam is a melange of the legacy of Spanish colonialism (particularly seen in surnames), indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) people, and American colonization interrupted by Japanese occupation during WWII. With a total population equivalent to that of a middling US city, it is perhaps not surprising that there has been a dearth of literature from the island.
Author: Susan Blumberg-Kason
Death is an uncomfortable subject yet in all cultures and societies there are jobs like undertakers and pathologists that deal with it on a daily basis. In the Chinese countryside, funeral cryers are a big part of the way people mourn death. Wenyan Lu’s debut novel, The Funeral Cryer, centers around a middle-aged woman in northeast China who goes into this profession to put food on the table when no one else in her family seems to be able to lift a hand. Lu’s book is a heartwarming story about death, but also life, love and finding hope.
Born of a Swiss mother and an Indian father and raised in England, Meira Chand’s novels have been set in Japan, Singapore, and India, and a couple have been adapted for the stage in London and Singapore. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she lived in India. Her recent book, The Pink, White and Blue Universe, is a new collection of thirteen stories set in India, many of which tackle the issues of belonging.
Seicho Matsumoto was one of Japan’s most celebrated mystery writers —with two dozen novels to his name from the late 1950s, at a time when Japan was rebuilding after the war until just before his death in 1992—but only in recent years his work has been translated into English. Point Zero, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is one of his early novels. The story, set in 1958 and the first part of 1959, takes place mainly in Tokyo and the western port city of Kanazawa and is defined by both the hope of the new era and the agonies of war.
Therapist Haesoo Lim used to appear on television to provide her professional opinion on matters in the news. But after speaking about a famous male actor, her career took a nosedive when the actor committed suicide. Haesoo not only lost her job, but her marriage also fell apart. Kim Hye-jin’s new novel Counsel Culture, translated by Jamie Chang, may be a small, contemplative book, but it packs a big punch with vibrant characters, both human and feline.
In 1975, journalist Ian Gill met up with his mother Billie in Hong Kong. He flew in from his home in New Zealand while she came from her home in Geneva. They hadn’t seen each other in a few years and Ian thought it would be just a chance to catch up with his mother. He had never visited Hong Kong and Billie hadn’t been back since World War II. Instead of a quiet holiday, Billie started introducing Ian to her old friends, friends she had known during the War. Ian knew very little about his mother’s years in China and Hong Kong, and what he began learning on that trip started to seem worthy of a book. And, as he would find, Billie and the people she knew in Shanghai and Hong Kong have already been the subject of a number of books. Now almost fifty years after that initial introduction to his mother’s past, Gill has published a family memoir, Searching for Billie: A Journalist’s Quest to Understand His Mother’s Past Leads Him to Discover a Vanished China. It’s a fascinating look at his mother’s early years in Shanghai and Hong Kong, but it’s also a who’s who in Chinese and Hong Kong history.
Over the last few years, there’s been a renewed interest in pre-War Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong. A screenplay by David Henry Hwang starring Gemma Chan is in the works and the US Mint recently issued a quarter to commemorate her. A novel and narrative non-fiction study were published last year, but there hasn’t been a complete biography of her published in the United States until now. Katie Gee Salisbury, from Anna May’s hometown of Los Angeles, has captivatingly filled this gap in Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong, and none too soon at that.
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.
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.
Dan Morrison was researching the history of cholera in India when he came across a 1930s murder case that made headlines around the world at the time, but has since been forgotten, and found therein a story fit for a medical thriller. An Indian film in the 1970s was loosely based on the story, but even this fictional account could not compare to the theatrics of the true story. Morrison has written a new true crime book, The Poisoner of Bengal: The 1930s Murder That Shocked the World, that reads like a fictional thriller thought up by someone with a wild imagination. But it’s apparent from Morrison’s substantial bibliography and endnotes that all of the details in his book are in fact true.
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