The star in Opera Hong Kong’s new production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s singspiel “The Magic Flute” is the staging. That is not to take anything away from the singing: Mexican tenor Andrés Moreno Garcia as Tamino, Americans John Chest and Sofia Troncoso (Papageno and Pamina) all sang credibly. Local soprano Rachel Kwok was a sparky Papagena and the “three ladies” (Candice Chung, Ashley Chui and Carol Lin—done up as airline stewardesses, more of which later) more than held their own.
Sixth-grader Lina Uesugi received a strange set of instructions from her father before the beginning of summer vacation: “Go to the Misty Valley. There’s a person there who was good to me years ago.” He didn’t explain to her why she should go or what will happen when she arrives. He simply put her on a train from Shizuoka Prefecture, about 145 kilometers (90 miles) down Japan’s eastern coast from Tokyo, to head north and inland.
Podcast with Lizhi Liu, author of “From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China”
Alibaba. Tencent. JD. Pinduoduo. Run down the list of China’s most valuable companies and you’ll find, for the most part, that they’re all e-commerce companies—or at least facilitate e-commerce. The sector created giants: Alibaba grew from just 5.5 billion renminbi of revenue in 2010 to 280 billion last year.
Japanese painters, printmakers, and sculptors who produced artwork in support of Tokyo’s war efforts in the period between 1931 and 1945, had to pivot as they continued their careers in the shadow of empire during the seven-year US occupation occupation, which began with Japan’s defeat in 1945 and ended in 1952 under a Cold War peace treaty.
Few cities in the world can be as unknown to outsiders as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and The Book of Sana’a is the first major collection of Yemeni fiction in translation.
The work of Charles Tripp—professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) for over three decades—has shaped a distinct approach to the study of Middle East politics: an analytical sensibility that is empirically rich, theoretically insightful, and historically sensitive.
TS Eliot concludes his 1922 poem, “The Waste Land”, with three words: Shantih Shantih Shantih. This Sanskrit term for peace is the title of Daryl Qilin Yam’s novella that centers around the implausible idea of a quick snowfall in Singapore in the middle of the night when most people are still asleep. Yam weaves twelve interrelated stories around this snowfall, bringing together a dozen characters from various backgrounds who all find themselves awake at four in the morning.
Ma Thanegi’s roots are deeply planted in Myanmar. She’s the great-niece of a noble scoundrel who once ornamented the court of King Thibaw, her country’s last king, and the great-granddaughter of one of the last queen’s ladies-in-waiting. The daughter of a sophisticated, mercurial intellectual and the brilliant, tempestuous beauty who was his wife, Ma Thanegi has spent her life in Myanmar with the ambition of revealing its beauties and virtues to the rest of the world. She’s achieved her goal through her writing, with six books written in English and published internationally, but until now her own story has been told only in fragments.
“Writers on writing” is a genre in itself, one to which readers flock. However, Indian authors, especially those writing in regional Indian languages, are rarely represented in this genre meant for the internationally-acknowledged the-Western-and-the-famous. Therefore, Hindi writer Geet Chaturvedi’s The Master of Unfinished Things, translated into English by Anita Gopalan, will come as a breath of curious air.
Podcast with Mayukh Sen, author of “Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star”
In 2022, Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. But she wasn’t the first actress of Asian origin to be nominated. In 1935, Merle Oberon was nominated for Best Actress for the role of Kitty Vane in The Dark Angel, only her second film in the US film industry.
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