In a place like Hong Kong, where every child seems to be learning at least two languages, there is, at the very least, a practical argument for bilingualism: learning a second language (in Hong Kong, usually English) opens doors for future opportunities. For Hong Kong’s anglophone minority speakers this argument continues with many parents hoping…
Translating poetry gives rise to a number of problems which may not be present in prose. Poetic language is different from that of prose; it employs many more literary devices. Furthermore, its rhythms may be quite different or varied. Then there is the question of rendering form and meter, not to mention rhyme, if it’s…
Political scientists who study international relations often seek to discern patterns of state behavior from history and to formulate theories or typologies to explain that behavior. Such an approach can contribute to our understanding of why states behave as they do, but human action never wholly conforms to neat formulas.
Persia was long a fault-line in an Islam that liked to think of itself, and was often presented as being, monolithic. Notwithstanding the best efforts of the Umayyad Caliphate—which defeated the Persian Sassanids in the 7th century—at both Arabization and Islamization, linguistic, cultural and even religious divisions remained. Persian identity began to reassert itself soon…
With her sinuously taut sculpture “The Arch of Hysteria” (1993), French artist Louise Bourgeois addressed deep-seated Western cultural associations between women, hysteria, and sexual dysfunction. Drawing on the ideas of 19th-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, under whom Freud had studied and whose ideas enjoyed a great deal of currency among many Surrealist artists years later,…
There is a longish section in Grace E Lavery’s Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan on Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado and which asks, among other things, whether the operetta is really about Japan. Spoiler alert: it might be, or might not be, depending whom you ask and exactly what you ask.
Andrew Shaw was for many years a “trouble shooter” television journalist in the employ of the BBC. His job required him to pick up and fly to wherever whatever piece of news was breaking. After what many would regard as an enviable pursuit of exhaustive and widely varied paid foreign travel, he tired of it…
Under Red Skies is being plugged as the first English-language memoir by a Chinese millennial, which already sets it apart from other books about China’s younger generation. Books like Alec Ash’s Wish Lanterns or Zak Dychtwald’s Young China, for all of their merits, were written by expats. In contrast, Chinese-born Karoline Kan tells the story…
“Pardon me for asking,” says an elderly lady called Kaoru (a unisexual Japanese name meaning “perfume” or “fragrance”) to the protagonist, Mitsuki Katsura, and another hotel guest, “but has either of you come here to commit suicide?”
“Sensei”, a diminutive older woman, teaches Janet Pocorobba how to play the shamisen, a traditional three-stringed Japanese instrument. It is hard to tune and exactly how much “ma” or dead space to leave between the notes is constantly vexing. Sensei is of the view that the shamisen, and traditional music in general, is much neglected…
Kerry Brown has earned a reputation as one of the most prolific and yet reasonable commentators on China. In The Future of UK-China Relations, he turns his eye on his home country.
Commentaries on Islam in Indonesia—especially those attached to major political events such as the recent presidential election—often deal in simplistic binary terms: a uniform mass of apparently ascendant “conservative Muslims” is ranged against similarly uniform blocks of embattled urban liberals or rural traditionalists.
Various degrees of financial precariousness and a vibrant—yet maddingly hot and humid—Malaysia are the theme and setting of Tash Aw’s newest novel We, The Survivors. Through the main character Ah Hock, an ethnically Hokkien Chinese Malaysian, a tantalizing story of broken family life that crisscrosses both the megacity of Kuala Lumpur and the tropical provinces…
In 2006, the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman penned a now-notorious column titled “The Taxi Driver”. In it, Friedman recounts a cab ride from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport in which, to Friedman’s disappointment, the driver neglects to engage in conversation with his eminent passenger.
Dark secrets in the steamy jungle of British colonial Malaya are the subject of this engrossing retelling of William Somerset Maugham’s short story, The Force of Circumstance.