During the 1910s, Hong Kong’s new Governor Francis Henry May seconded a delegation of Sikh police officers to Fiji. May had had a recent stint as Governor of Fiji and before that Captain Superintendent of the Hong Kong Police Force. He felt that Hong Kong’s police force could teach Fiji a thing or two. While it was by no means unusual for the British to employ Sikh policemen in their imperial possessions, Fiji differed in that it already had a population of Indian indentured servants who worked the sugarcane fields on a contract for five years.
Author: Susan Blumberg-Kason
Lily, living in London, receives a mysterious letter naming her in an inheritance from a stranger in Hong Kong. To claim it, she must travel to Hong Kong. Her older sister, Maya, has received the same letter but chooses to ignore it. A successful lawyer, Maya feels no connection to her mother’s birthplace and doesn’t wish to feel beholden to anyone, especially a stranger. Maya resembles their late father, Julian, with blond hair and light eyes, while Lily resembles their late mother, Sook-Yin, with dark hair and dark eyes. Lily is convinced she embarrasses Maya because she is a constant reminder that they come from a complicated background. Just how complicated is something that Lily will soon discover when she flies to Hong Kong in late June 1997 without informing her sister.
Brinda Charry found inspiration, she writes in her author’s note, for her debut novel The East Indian, from a little known piece of US history. Dating from almost the first days of the English settlement in the early 1600s, servants and laborers from India arrived in colonial Virginia and Maryland via London, having been England in the first place as servants to officials of the East India Company. Charry explored this piece of history and set her story around the first-known Indian immigrant, a young Tamil man who went by the name of Tony. The result is a fascinating story in itself—Tony’s adventures, sometimes against his will and sometimes by choice—complemented by vivid writing.
When development began in earnest in Beijing, migrants from around China flocked to the capital city for jobs of all sorts. There was money to be made and when young people did not pass their university entrance exams—or didn’t take them in the first place—they viewed Beijing as as good a place to make money as anywhere else in China. Xu Zechen sets his novel Beijing Sprawl in pre-Olympics Beijing on the outskirts of the city where four young men originally from a small town in Zhejiang province live and work.
At the beginning of Once Our Lives, Qin Sun Stubis’s family memoir, the author’s grandmother feeds a beggar because she feels sorry for him. She is pregnant with the author’s father at the time and goes on to break the traditional month-long confinement after giving birth in order to continue giving food to the beggar. What ensues, according to the grandmother, is a curse that plagues her son throughout her life, and the family indeed meets with much hardship. But so did most people in China between the years of 1942 and 1975, the time in which most of the multi-generation story takes place.
Once upon a time, many of the largest cities in what was at the time called the “Near East” enjoyed the benefits of the presence of thriving Jewish communities. Constantinople, Aleppo and Baghdad were just a few cities with tens of thousands of Jews that have since dwindled down to almost a handful. In award-winning Elizabeth Graver’s new novel, Kantika, she writes about her grandmother’s Sephardic family from Constantinople. At the end of the book, she states that she decided to use family photos and real names to keep parts of her story true all while using creative license with ancillary details.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain, already an accomplished poet, translator, and zheng harpist, now has a debut novel, Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories. What at first seem like stand-alone stories of generations of women searching for a sense of belonging in a new setting, be that in China, Singapore, France, or the United States have characters that overlap or a small detail like a song or a writer—which can be easy to miss—that carries over from one story to another.
Peter Constantine is one of the most prominent—and diverse—contemporary translators. He has published English translations from Russian, German, French, Italian, Modern and Ancient Greek, Albanian, Dutch and Slovene, winning numerous awards for his translations of Machiavelli, Babel, and Thomas Mann. It’s only now that he’s come out with a novel, The Purchased Bride, based on the story of how his paternal grandparents met. It comes as no surprise then that language is an important part of this story.
In Karin Lin-Greenberg’s debut novel, You Are Here, arranged into sections according to an academic year, starting in September and ending in June, a high school senior named Maria tells her best friend that she enjoys working at a shopping mall in their hometown of Albany, New York, because she feels “it’s a great place to study humanity.” Lin-Greenberg is a captivating storyteller and deploys the shopping mall setting to show that no matter one’s background, people are more alike than different.
In June 2020, Christina Wong and Daniel Innes started an Instagram account to document Toronto’s disappearing Chinatown. Innes would draw a building or a street scene and Wong would pair it with text. Toronto’s Chinatown enjoys a long history and it had been one of the largest in North America before gentrification and redevelopment started in the 1950s. And like most Chinatowns, the language spoken on the street and at home was originally Toisanese. Family association halls, grocery stores, bakeries, banks, and public libraries catered to Chinatown residents and gave them a sense of community.
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