Last year, Korean literature burst into English-language consciousness when Han Kang’s The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize. The process began earlier, of course: Kyung-sook Shin had won the Man Asian Literary Prize a few years previously. But this is nevertheless a phenomenon of relatively recent vintage. Not everyone can be a Han Kang,…
William J Rust has been researching and studying the history of US relations with the nations of Southeast Asia for more than three decades in an effort to explain the origins of the Second Indochina War. His latest book, Eisenhower & Cambodia, focuses on the Eisenhower administration’s policies toward Cambodia and its mercurial leader Norodom…
Discussions on the so-called “rise” of China at some point tend to cycle ’round to the question as to whether these developments are new or instead herald a return to a status quo ante, a consideration which depends in no small part as what that status quo actually was. That China was dominant in East…
Outsider views of Singapore suffer from numerous preconceptions and generalizations, many the result of sometimes humorous foreign venting in online forums about the city-state’s overweening legal apparatus and legal codes. Yet Singapore is affluent and materially developed by any measure. Nor is Singapore is widely known as a place of literature, but that is at…
Nanjing Never Cries, the first novel by physicist Hong Zheng, tells the story of four central characters and how their lives are forever changed by the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and the sacking of the capital of Nanjing in 1937.
Hong Kong in the Cold War, edited by Priscilla Roberts and John M Carroll, is an academic collection of essays about the city’s history during the first half of the Cold War. The collection can roughly be split into two halves: Hong Kong’s security situation, and its cultural development.
Hong Kong is currently going through something of an identity crisis, both literally and figuratively. The literal crisis is the rise of a so-called “localist” political movement, some proponents of which have even called for Hong Kong independence. The more figurative crisis are the regular pronouncements that Hong Kong is having difficulty working out its…
There is no faster way to gauge the depth of a well than to drop a stone, and wait for the heavy thud signalling it has reached the bottom. Indian writer Karan Mahajan is more ambitious. In his latest book, he throws not a rock, but a deafening bomb that leaves in its wake a…
Hong Kong’s Sir David Tang has for several years had a column at the Financial Times answering reader questions on various matters of modern living, from how to dress for a job interview to (only in Britain) what to take as a house gift when invited up to shoot. These, or least a selection of…
The drama in JFK Miller’s tenure as a magazine editor in Shanghai from 2006-2011 came not from deadlines or chasing stories, but official censorship. Six years later, Miller’s account of this experience isn’t so much outdated as understated, because censorship in China is still just as pertinent now as it was then, except it is…
From the gangplank of a pre-war steamship to the present, via the jazz underground of 1960s London, Hannah Lowe’s rewarding second collection revels in the company of an unlikely crew of voices and personalities. Chan takes its name from the poet’s father (nicknamed, in turn, after the Polish card magician Chan Canasta) but does not…
In 1946, John Hersey published the first account of the horrors that awaited those unlucky enough to survive the bomb in his short Hiroshima. Seventy years on, Susan Southard has done the same for Nagasaki. She interleaves the nightmares visited on five young victims (hibakusha) within the broader context of Japanese totalitarianism, the decision to…
Guo Xiaolu has always been a writer who has worn both her heart and her integrity on her sleeve, whether tearing pages from her own life for her novels, experimenting publically with form or writing in what is for her an entirely foreign language (something which is the cause for astonishment when an English-language writer…
Richard Kirkby’s China memoir Intruder in Mao’s Realm has a hint of the nineteenth century about it: frank and scrupulous in recording quotidian detail, it is a refreshingly unrefined book, in the manner of those accounts returned by Victorian missionaries and travellers after visits to unknown lands.
Apart from on the Peninsula itself and in the vernacular, the Korean War is framed by a chronology between June 1950 and July 1953. Su-kyoung Hwang’s Korea’s Grievous War challenges that common perception by pushing its opening salvos back to shortly after the Peninsula’s liberation from Japanese colonial occupation in August 1945.