Pale skin is valued in Asia: cosmetics to whiten skin such as “White Perfect” and “Fair & Lovely” are widely advertised. To Americans, and Asian-Americans, however, promotion of skin-whitening products appears to be racist and “colorist”, as people of color in the US have suffered from discrimination by the white majority. Whiter is a new anthology of essays by Asian-American women on skin color and “colorism”, edited by Nikki Khanna, a sociologist whose previous work has focused on biracial identity.
Ideology grappled geography in a civil war with no end. As the Korean War froze along the trenches and barbed wire entanglements, harbingers of the final line of control that was to divide North from South for a lifetime, the United States fought and sought a political triumph as a surrogate for military failure on the battlefield. Armistice talks in May 1951 started, hiccuped, stopped and then were reborn and recycled as Washington stubbornly—to the chagrin and incredulity of its own negotiators—refused to abide by the 1949 Geneva Convention requiring the simple repatriation of prisoners of war (POWs) at the end of military conflict.
Souvankham Thammavongsa has come a long way from Nong Khai refugee camp in Thailand in which she was born in 1978. Her family, originally from Laos, were able to settle in Canada when she was a year old.
Husayn ibn ‘Abdallah, more usually known as General Husayn, died in Florence in 1887. Born in Circassia in the late 1820s, he was sold as a slave to agents of the bey of Tunis, raised and trained there, ultimately rising to hold some of the most senior positions in the government.
As Asian-American writers are increasingly considered mainstream, populate “best books” and “books to watch” lists, and receive acclaim from both critics and the general public, there has been a rediscovery of works of some of the early pioneers. Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, just re-released by University of Washington Press as part of its Classics of Asian American Literature series, was first published in 1961, re-released in 1979 and adapted for film by Wayne Wang in 1989, also to critical acclaim.
Bertrand Russell, a philosopher possessed of a razor-sharp analytical mind, once said that he didn’t want to write about Confucius because he found the Chinese philosopher “boring”.
Presented as a confession, this first novel in English from screenwriter and Iranian exile Javad Djavahery is a deeply nostalgic tale of love and loss set against the revolution of 1979. The unnamed narrator, relating events to an unnamed companion, has some odious wrongdoing to admit. He reveals himself to be self-serving and cowardly as the story progresses. Yet such is Djavahery’s skill that the reader never entirely loses sympathy with him.
In a 1975 review of Marius Jansen’s Japan and China: From War to Peace, 1894-1972, Chalmers Johnson wrote, “One of the long-standing defects of Western scholarship on eastern Asia is its compartmentalization. China and Japan are usually studied in isolation from each other.” An accomplished scholar of both countries’ histories by then, Johnson knew of what he spoke, and praised Jansen’s exception to the academic rule. Were he still alive and reviewing, Johnson would surely similarly praise China and Japan: Facing History, the most recent work by another eminent scholar of east Asia, the soon-to-be-90 Ezra Vogel.
The Tantra is an Indian esoteric doctrine of mysticism spanning Hinduism and Buddhism. It incorporates not just the spiritual but also the sexual ways of becoming one with the divine. While the Indian poets belonging to the devotional bhakti movement have written about the possibilities of the union with God with a hint of eroticism, this extreme route of using sexual practice to know everything, including the ultimate divinity, has remained unexplored.
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