Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You, Candice Chung’s “memoir of saying the unsayable with food”, feels like a glimpse into her peri-pandemic journal. The title refers to the often-shared recognition by the children of immigrants, that expressions of love are indirect, and also filtered through food.
Category Archive: Non-Fiction
Fyodor Tertitskiy, a young and prolific academic specialist on North Korean affairs working in Seoul, has written a biography of the first North Korean leader that is both highly readable and extensively researched.
If you only read one book by the prolific and (now) venerable John Man, it should perhaps be this one, literally so for it “revises and condenses” several chapters in his other books Genghis Khan, The Terracotta Army, Barbarians at the Wall, The Great Wall and Xanadu. It is, as one might expect from Man, a very readable amalgam of history, storytelling and travel-writing.
Few subjects have progressed as rapidly in recent years as the study of prehistory and ancient history. The ability to decode the human genome has upended everything. In retrospect, archaeologists and linguists got an amazing amount right; the advent of DNA analysis (backed up by huge amounts of computing power) provided a layer of scientific confidence, allowing the other disciplines to progress faster and more accurately.
September 2nd will mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender to the United States aboard the USS Missouri, ending the Second World War. The US decision to drop two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—what drove Japan to surrender, at least in popular history—is still controversial to this day.
For many Asian families, it might be difficult not to have a memory of ginseng. I remember my mother making tea from American ginseng and my violin teacher using it to infuse his vodka. But I can’t remember ever asking about it or even why it was continually referred to as “American” ginseng, rather than just ginseng.
As Merle Oberon starred in four dozen films during the golden age of Hollywood, she kept a secret that could have immediately destroyed her career: she was biracial and was born and raised in India. While no longer a secret, her story has all but been forgotten. Mayukh Sen’s new biography of Oberon, Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, the first in decades, uniquely delves into her family’s background going back to Bombay and Calcutta, where she was born and grew up.
Chinese travelers first made their way to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean in the 14th century, looking for goods like coconuts, cowries, and ambergris. That started centuries of travel to the islands, including one trip by famed sailor Zheng He. Then, quickly, the Maldives—and the broader Indian Ocean—vanished as Ming China turned inward.
For over two decades, Chinese leaders have sought to rebalance their economy away from dependence on investment and exports and towards growth based on domestic consumption. In that context, few developments could have been more propitious than the explosive growth in internet commerce. While the benefits for consumers are obvious, digital marketplaces also allowed small manufacturers to proffer their wares nationwide. These “Taobao Villages” promise to alleviate China’s stubborn rural-urban inequality in the bargain. Lizhi Liu’s new book From Click to Boom explains the origins and effects of China’s vast e-commerce sector, while shedding light on its heretofore ambiguous relationship with the authorities.
Ankara-born Chris Aslan spent seven years living in Khiva, an old Silk Road town in what is now Uzbekistan, where he founded a silk carpet workshop. Expelled in 2005 during a purge of foreign NGOs, he then spent three years in Khorog, a town on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. Told by the authorities that perhaps he’d better leave there as well, he had a spell in Kyrgyzstan. In each place, Aslan clearly intends to “help”, whether by attempting to provide livelihoods at a time of chronic unemployment in Uzbekistan, help yak herders commercialise their animals’ down (competitive with cashmere, it seems) or to establish a school for carving walnut wood.
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