The Philippine economy has, relative to both its history and many other parts of the world, seen something of a recent boom. Yet although the poverty rate has plunged by about a third in the three years to 2018, Filipinos leaving their country for a future abroad still abound. Longtime New York Times reporter Jason DeParle explores global migration through a tightly-woven biography of a Filipino migrant family in A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century.
A rare and precious glimpse of pre-Khmer Rouge literature, Suon Sorin’s recently translated novel is set during Norodom Sihanouk’s Cambodia. Originally published in 1961, it harks back to the late colonial and post-colonial eras.
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.”
The first few weeks of January, falling as they do between the two New Years’, are culturally relatively quiet. The Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival, now the Beare’s Premiere Music Festival, has long been one of the major events brightening this relatively uneventful period.
Part memoir and part fiction, Ship of Sorrows, translation of the modernist Urdu novel Safina e Gham e Dil by Qurratulain Hyder, is a complex take on the representation of the Partition. Hyder uses the historical event to dwell on the intellectual and artistic angles of the act of living in an era that writers normally use as a backdrop for human drama.
As a child growing up in Atlanta, author Julie Leung didn’t have the opportunity to read about inspiring Chinese-Americans and, specifically, Chinese-American artists. When she learned about Tyrus Wong, the artist who created the style in the Walt Disney film Bambi, through his New York Times obituary, Leung decided to write his story in the picture-book biography Paper Son: The inspiring story of Tyrus Wong, immigrant and artist.
We all belong somewhere: a place of our birth, the origin of our being. But there are those who belong to nowhere, an existence without a motherland, or circling in-between, as if in bardo. The Tibetan Suitcase is a story of the peripatetic life of the protagonist, an Indian-born Tibetan.
Literary allusions to Babylon and Assyria are often not very complimentary, and they are most certainly based on common misconceptions.
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 Goldfish is a sumptuous, surreal exploration of femininity. The poet inhabits the voice of a goldfish through a series of linguistically experimental poems which plunge us into the glass bowl and invite us to gaze out.
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