Hong Kong has often been called a “cultural desert”; while this is both uncharitable and less than entirely accurate, few question that Hong Kong punches below its weight culturally and has long failed to make optimal use of its many natural advantages. John Duffus’s recent memoir, Backstage in Hong Kong, provides a blow-by-blow narrative as to why this has been, and arguably remains, the case.
Memoir
Nanako Hanada’s The Bookshop Woman chronicles the unique magic books have to connect people. In her 30s with her marriage and career on the brink, Nanako joins an online matching service that she refers to as PerfectStrangers. Though it resembles a dating site, it’s meant to connect people for thirty-minute conversations around shared interests. To make her profile stand out, she sets a goal to give personalized book recommendations to every person she meets through the site.
Part memoir, part documentary, and part travel reportage (in no clear proportion), publisher and bookseller Akshaya Bahibala’s debut book Bhang Journeys tells tales of malady and well-being, all tied to the same source: cannabis.
Thirty years ago, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn published their first book, China Wakes, to critical acclaim. The couple wrote of their five years reporting about China for The New York Times from 1988 to 1993. Other journalists reporting on China have followed suit and we’ve seen books by Jan Wong, Mike Chinoy, Frank Langfitt, Dori Jones Yang, Rob Schmitz, Lenora Chu, and Karoline Kan, among others. There is also the Peace Corps cohort of Peter Hessler and Michael Meyer, who went on to become journalists and write about China. These books have brought China to readers who are both familiar with the country and who are just starting to learn about it, and in most cases, these journalists chose to write about a certain city, region, or period.
Tracy O’Neill was adopted from South Korea in the 1980s and never thought to search for her birth mother until 2020 when the world seemed to stop. She had just landed a tenure-track position at Vassar and had broken up with a long-term boyfriend. With more time on her hands—teaching online and not leaving her new apartment much—she had the desire to find her birth mother in Korea. The story of her search, discovery and meeting her mother is the subject of her third book, Woman of Interest. This is hardly the first adoption memoir, but O’Neill is a writer of some pedigree with a couple of novels under her belt, which perhaps explains why her memoir at times reads like a thriller and does so right at the beginning.
If India is a woman’s body, her arms outstretched to hold her billion babies, Kashmir is the unruly forelock above her right temple. Or at least, that’s what I thought as a child, when my Nanaji took out his historical maps, pre-Partition and post- , to show me how we had been carved up. Since then, since the internet, I’ve zoomed in on that northwestern border countless times, tracing my fingers over the mess of dotted lines that vaguely indicate where I was born. If you log in from Pakistan, the Kashmir region is labeled as disputed. From India, it is solid line, appearing firmly under Indian control.
When Mark O’Neill first came to Taiwan in 1981 to study Mandarin, the island was under martial law that had been in place for several decades. Since then, Taiwan has undergone momentous changes to become a modern and prosperous democracy while remaining one of the world’s geopolitical hotspots, a great deal of which O’Neill witnessed and covers in The Island.