The country is made up almost entirely of immigrants, yet the United States goes through decades-long bouts of antipathy toward them. Journalist Jia Lynn Yang’s family emigrated to the United States from Taiwan in 1976; it wasn’t until much later that she learned her family had benefited from a US policy only a decade old when her parents applied for visas. Interested in the change in policy, she set out to research US immigration law during the period when it was restricted the most. Her new book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, tells the fascinating story of how these immigration restrictions came to be and why they were relaxed after four decades.
“Historians”, wrote Simon Schama, “are painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation,” but Amy Stanley succeeds as well as anyone could hope in her masterfully told and painstakingly researched evocation of an ordinary Japanese woman’s life in Edo on the eve of the opening of Japan.
Back in the day, whenever one was in a waiting room or vestibule, one would likely come across a copy of “Reader’s Digest”, which would include a diverse selection of pieces, often abridged, often extracts from elsewhere: easy reading, something to interest anyone and everyone, thought-provoking but not enough to require too much mental exertion.
Raj Bhatt is a professor of anthropology at a university in California and father of two young sons. Raj’s wife, Eva, grew up in the town where they live and had been a member of an exclusive members’ only tennis club as a child. So when Raj and Eva marry, they naturally join the Tennis Club, or TC, as Raj calls it, which has, unsurprisingly, a mostly white clientele.
Adeeba Shahid Talukder, a translator of Persian and Urdu poetry into English, makes an audacious attempt to invoke the sensibility of the ghazal in her contemporary American verse. That a young, first-generation American writer can have such a feel for the ghazal is not a given, for the genre is full of traps, arising from gender, from the audience, from the poet’s voice, to the poet’s relationship to the tradition. Talukder escapes, successfully, from each of these in turn.
November 12, 1941 was in Shanghai a day like another. Except that this was the day of the Champions Day horse races at the Shanghai Race Club. And that within a month the Japanese would put an end to the Shanghai that everyone knew. In Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai, James Carter uses this one day to paint a “kaleidoscopic portrait” of a dynamic city on the brink of war. On that day thousands of people across Shanghai gathered at one of three places around the city: a celebration of Sun Yat-sen’s birthday; the funeral of Liza Hardoon, Asia’s wealthiest woman; and the Champions Day horse races at the Shanghai Race Club.
Liberal intellectuals, whether in India or writing about India, may not take kindly to Brian A Hatcher’s latest book Hinduism Before Reform. But it is a book that they must read to examine the roots of their attitude towards everything perceived as right-wing Hinduism in India and the Indian diaspora.
The story begins in Jakarta, a hubbub of street vendors, motorbikes, and calls to prayer from mosque loudspeakers. “Travelling is the most ancient desire”, writes Intan Paramaditha in her first novel, a choose-your-own-adventure story published this February as global mobility ground to a halt. The wandering narrator, addressed in the second person befitting the conventions of the form, travels along multiple routes to Berlin, New York, and even outer space as she faces ordeals that illustrate the privileges of going abroad and the limitations of individual choice.
Chinese often claim a special relationship, sometimes verging on kinship, with Jews. The origins and reasons remain unclear but it may be at least in part due to two Jewish families—the Sassoons and their rivals, the Kadoories—both of whom played lasting roles in the development of two of China’s most modern cities: Shanghai and its rival, Hong Kong.
On 7 September 1695, just off Surat in Gujarat, an English pirate ship knocked off the Fath Mahmamadi, owned by an Indian trader who, according to a contemporary source, did as much trade alone as the East Indian Company all together. The pirates had been waiting for it at the Bab-el-Mandeb between Arabia and the Horn of Africa, but the Fath Mahmamadi had slipped by them in the dark of night. The pirates, whose ship the Fancy was one of the fastest afloat, beat the Indian vessel back to its home port and laid in wait again. The Fath Mahmamadi surrendered after a single broadside, yielding more gold and silver than the pirates had ever seen in one place.
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