The pursuit of meritocracy has proven a sort of holy grail for many policymakers and social-planners, perhaps nowhere more so than in Asia, where it can be explicitly invoked as the way to catch up with and even leapfrog the West. The cleverly-entitled Making Meritocracy is a collection of scholarly essays investigating the past and present of meritocracy in, primarily, China and India.
Island of Bewilderment is a recent English translation of Jazire-ye Sargardāni, a historical novel by the late Simin Daneshvar, originally in Persian and published in 1992. Daneshvar (1921- 2012) was considered Iran’s first female novelist. Her books were about the lives of ordinary people, especially women, through the lens of political and social events in the country. She was also a renowned translator and counted Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard among her translations into Persian. She was the wife of the famous social critic and writer, Jalal Ale-Ahmad, also a writer of acclaim.
In 1980, the Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman noted “It is somewhat ironic that Hong Kong, a Crown colony of Great Britain, should be the modern exemplar of free markets and limited government. The British officials who govern it have enabled Hong Kong to flourish by following policies radically at variance with the welfare state policies that have been adopted in the mother country.” That explanation serves well enough for Hong Kong’s manufacturers, but how to account for businesses more aligned with the state? Private airlines, for example, inevitably depend on public infrastructure. Moreover, the government’s ability to negotiate landing rights is inescapable when every flight is international by definition. Hong Kong Takes Flight, a new book by John Wong, explores how that city’s flagship carrier adapted and grew for decades amid explosive growth and turbulent politics.
In the strategy game Civilization VI, where players choose world leaders to be their avatar, Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor of China, has one goal in mind: building wonders (like the Great Wall of China). His workers can build wonders faster and more cheaply, and he hates leaders that build more wonders than he does.
Ships in the Desert is a collection of linked essays that seamlessly incorporates elements of memoir, travel writing, and literary journalism in a series of vivid vignettes that are both intimate and wide-ranging.
It helps to be reminded from time to time that literature, all other objectives aside, is at bottom storytelling. And Turkish Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel Nights of Plague is storytelling so luxuriant that one cannot help but soak in it.
Set in a disturbing dystopia, Saha, Korean author Cho Nam-joo’s latest work following the wildly successful Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, tells the story of the bottom rung of a dark society.
The fluid variety of this professional linguist’s range emerges from the very first phrase of this, her third collection, in a poem entitled “Wanderlust Ghazal”: “My language is a Bedouin thief, delighting in foreign sands.” For this traveller poet, being transnational seems to form a sort of dialect in itself, a language even.
Of all the waves of Chinese emigration that have taken place throughout history, it is arguably the Cantonese diaspora that has left an indelible mark wherever they have settled around the globe. The footprints of early migrants—mainly from Hong Kong or southern mainland China—can be tracked by the opening of Chinese takeaways, through which a (Westernized) taste of home was introduced to foreign lands.
Two neighbors from the same village fall in love and elope to a shelter for couples that break caste norms. A Hindu woman falls in love with a Muslim man, drawing the ire of Hindu nationalists. Two women start a lesbian relationship.
You must be logged in to post a comment.