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…
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…
Jack Weatherford has a clutch of informed, and impassioned, books on the Mongols to his credit. In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, he argued that the Mongols were the precursors of modern economic globalization: The Mongols displayed a devoutly and persistently internationalist zeal in their political, economic, and intellectual endeavors….
The good news is that is Musica Viva’s four-performance run of Carmen was completely sold out.
Macau is endlessly fascinating in no small part because it is so anomalous. Dating back to the “Age of Exploration”, it was the only Iberian possession in East Asia that survived as such into the 20th century—and two years longer than Hong Kong. In spite of all the recent development, it is still a city…
In The People’s Money, Chatham House’s Paola Subacchi discusses the internationalization, or relative lack thereof, of the renminbi. The subject can be rather like a room of mirrors if one does not follow developments in international currencies, but for those that do, the book serves as a clear overview of the history and the issues,…
For a book targeted at children, Division to Unification in Imperial China has a ponderous title. Parents and teachers might wish to cover this over with masking tape so that young readers instead concentrate on the handsome black, white and ochre illustration that otherwise adorns the cover.
An article in the most recent Economist was subtitled “China’s newest export hit is classical music” with a lede about the China Philharmonic Orchestra on tour in New York. Once, classical music generally travelled from the West to the rest. Now China is reversing the exchange, not merely performing Western classical music in China,…
Manila was not the best place to be on New Year’s Eve 1941. US General Douglas MacArthur had withdrawn to Corregidor and had declared Manila an “open city”, not that the Japanese forces—literally at the city gates and expected to enter the next morning—were paying much attention to that. But Melville Jacoby, a journalist for…
There may come a time when Asian-American writing loses its hyphen and becomes “American”. Ranbir Singh Sidhu’s debut novel Deep Singh Blue provides some indication that this point may be approaching.
Vladimir K Arsenyev was an army officer, explorer and writer active in Russia’s Far East in the waning years of the Romanov dynasty. His major claim to fame, outside Russia at any rate, is having introduced the world to the aboriginal hunter and trapper Dersu Uzala, who several decades later became the subject of an…
After the 2011 tsunami, TV commercials were, out of respect, replaced with public service messages. One was the following poem: If I say, “Let’s play?” you say, “Let’s play!” If I say, “Stupid!” you say, “Stupid!” If I say, “I don’t want to play anymore,” you say, “I don’t want to play anymore.” And…
Alfred A Yuson’s The Music Child was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize at a time when the prize was for unpublished manuscripts. Although the finished novel took the better part of a decade to finally emerge, The Music Child and the Mahjong Queen exemplifies the Prize’s objective of facilitating the publication of…
Those with an academic interest in Chinese literature are undoubtedly aware of the CT Hsia classic History of Modern Chinese Fiction which has just been reissued by the Chinese University Press. Those who aren’t might find the thought of a 600-page tome of literary criticism to be more than a little daunting; that would be…
Unlike his Malaysian-Chinese compatriots, Tash Aw and Tan Twan Eng who have become well-known for novels which fit pretty squarely into the English-language, Ng Kim Chew writes in Chinese from a base in Taiwan. Slow Boat to China is a collection of his short stories, the first book of his—as far as I can tell—to…