“Little Gods” by Meng Jin
Elderly Shanghai neighbor Zhu Wen thinks she’s seeing ghosts. It’s been over fifteen years since her next door neighbors left their traditional Shanghai longtang apartment and asked Zhu Wen to watch over their unit.
“Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life” by Amber Scorah
Amber Scorah’s time in Shanghai was not the typical expat sojourn. “Revolutions do not come without violence,” she writes in her new memoir. “If I hadn’t come to China, I would never have even noticed. Somehow, in one of the most restrictive places in the world, I had found freedom.”
“Loveboat, Taipei” by Abigail Hing Wen
When Abigail Hing Wen was a teenager, she spent a summer in Taiwan to get in touch with her Chinese roots. The program, funded by the Republic of China, has been dubbed the “love boat”, but has nothing to do with ships or the sea.
“The Witchhunters: Scandal, Secrets and a Death that Shocked Hong Kong” by Simon J Blake and Nury Vittachi
The 1980 death of Hong Kong police officer John MacLennan shook the territory and made international news, eventually driving the Hong Kong courts to decriminalize homosexuality in 1991.
“The Magical Language of Others” by EJ Koh
Eun Ji Koh was a typical Californian teenager before her immigrant parents surprised Koh and her brother with some startling news. Her father had been offered a far more lucrative job back in Seoul than he could ever expect to be offered in the US. It isn’t uncommon for immigrants to return to their countries…
“A Song For China: How My Father Wrote Yellow River Cantata” by Ange Zhang
Only a few pieces of Chinese classical instrumental music have come close to entering the standard orchestral repertory. The 1939 “Yellow River Cantata” with lyrics by Guang Weiran set to music by Xian Xinghai, and the “Yellow River Concerto” later derived from it, is one of these.
“Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA” by Amaryllis Fox
As Amaryllis Fox’s memoir opens, she is walking through the back alleys of Karachi when she senses a man following her. What she doesn’t write then is that she has an infant daughter back home in Shanghai, cared for by her CIA undercover agent husband. Fox is also an undercover CIA agent but one who…
“Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale” by Adam Minter
Globalization usually means manufacturing. But globalization reaches into other realms, even waste disposal as Adam Minter wrote in his debut book, Junkyard Planet. In his new book, Secondhand, he investigates what happens to material goods we donate after we’re done using them and travels throughout North America, Asia, and Africa to explore how different countries…
“Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China” by Jung Chang
In the introduction to her new book, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China, Jung Chang writes that she originally set out to research a book on Sun Yat-sen to see if he really warranted the status of “Father of Modern China”. But the stories of Sun’s wife…
“Hong Kong Horror Cinema”, edited by Gary Bettinson and Daniel Martin
The golden era of Hong Kong cinema—1980 through the mid-1990s—coincided with the peak of the Hong Kong horror genre. At first glance, Hong Kong horror movies might seem to reflect the industry’s—and territory’s—desire to make money at any cost. But the collection of a dozen essays in Hong Kong Horror Cinema show that this was…
“The Song of the Jade Lily” by Kirsty Manning
Despite the growing tensions between China and the West, one East-West relationship has endured with a continuing mutual fascination: that of Jews and Chinese, one increasingly reflected in literature and film. In particular, the story of the Shanghai Jewish refugees has enjoyed a resurgence over the past decade; Kirsty Manning’s novel, The Song of the…
“How We Disappeared” by Jing-Jing Lee
This year Singapore celebrates its bicentennial, or rather, the 200th anniversary of the founding of the colonial city. Because of this milestone, there has been considerable soul-searching about the role of history in creating a people and WW2 naturally comes to mind. The war was not only one of the most traumatic episodes in the…
Two New Asian-American Graphic Novels
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two Jewish cartoonists brought the term “graphic novel” to the mainstream. Will Eisner’s A Contract With God tells the story of poor Jewish immigrants in New York tenements while Art Spiegelman’s Maus depicts two storylines that center around the Holocaust. These books address heavy subjects and differ from…
“Somewhere Only We Know”, YA novel by Maurene Goo
The cover of Somewhere Only We Know, Maurene Goo’s latest young adult novel, isn’t inordinately different from other contemporary romantic comedies: a young Asian woman is seated while a young Asian man leans into her back, only part of his face and an arm are visible. Yet the story is unusually set almost completely in…
“All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents” by Mieke Eerkens
Relatively little had been written about Indonesia during World War II and the conflict between the Dutch and Japanese in the Pacific. In her recent memoir, All Ships Follow Me, Mieke Eerkens starts with the complexity of her father’s upbringing in colonial Indonesia. The son of a Dutch family that had lived in what was…
