Taiwan’s top court just recently ruled in favor of gay marriage, culminating in what could be Asia’s first jurisdiction to allow members of the same sex to marry. Despite many challenges that still persist politically with the ruling, it indicates a more liberal attitude toward non-heterosexual relationships than when Qiu Miaojin published the novel Notes of a Crocodile in the early 1990s.
After the collapse of the Manchurian empire, Japan was keen to expand its holdings in Korea and the Pacific into Manchuria and eventually into Mongolia and the Russian Far East. Their argument was that Japan had to feed its huge population with scarce resources, so imperialist expansion was a matter of life and death.
Chinatown Sonnets is a sonnet sequence that updates the age-old idea of East meets West in which West fetishizes East, Hong Kong emulates Paris, Mong Kok is the “Times Square of Asia”, and primetime television in Hong Kong rivals American soap operas in upper class drama.
Tokyo is the world’s largest megalopolis, arguably the cleanest and safest too. But what fascinates me is the intricate way 34 million people survive in the density and sometimes crush of humanity. On the surface there may be a homogenous veneer to the inhabitants, but as I learned when living in Japan, Tokyo-ites have an intense, often fierce individuality. Getting to know a few of them well, they revealed their inner selves to me, which sparked a realization of a deeper individuality in myself.
Hong Kong Women in Publishing is an organization that promotes the status of women working in publishing and related fields and publishes an annual anthology of members’ writing and artwork. Imprint 16 is the latest volume in the series.
In the triumvirate of superpowers, only China and Russia share a border. In Beyond the Amur, Victor Zatsepine discusses how that border, or rather the eastern section of it, came to be.
One need look no further than Britain’s impending departure from the European Union for an example of how once apparently dormant elements of a nation’s self-image can be reawakened. An abiding historical sense of aloofness and suspicion of Europe, which seemed to have been quelled by the forces of globalisation in recent decades, has emerged in the last year with renewed vigour. Evident also in the appeal of Trump to persistent American notions of exceptionalism, the flattening of specific cultural characteristics engendered by globalisation seems not to have greatly shifted the fundamentals of how these countries view both themselves and the outside world.
North Korea is changing. Pyongyang is a dynamic city where the last decade has seen the skyline transformed at the behest of Kim Jong Un with lines of new tower blocks and colour painted across his father and grandfather’s monochrome urban landscape. The city’s ambience and the lives of those with money has been transformed with funfairs, and water parks, shopping centres, coffee bars, beer festivals and package holidays. Science is king with new museums and centers devoted to natural history, technology and weaponry. Outside in the countryside change comes slowly, while in the Northeast “rust belt” industrial revival is even slower. They are the source of the economic migrants fleeing for a better life in the South.
Two interesting phenomena intersected at the turn on the last century. Just as Indian women were becoming globally visible as winners of several international beauty pageants, the racialized body (non-white, brown, along with Arab) became visible as the Other in the aftermath of 9/11. This stark polarity marks the subject of a new book on South Asian diaspora community that studies how appearances make and unmake attitudes about beauty and what sort of people become public icons.
Baghdad is not a city readily associated with Christianity. Nevertheless, a small (and shrinking) community lives there. This brief but resonant novel describes the discrimination and abuse they suffer for their faith as well as offering an important insight into how intolerance (of any religion or lifestyle, not just Christianity) can escalate into violence and even war.
You must be logged in to post a comment.