Hong Kong has often been called a “cultural desert”; while this is both uncharitable and less than entirely accurate, few question that Hong Kong punches below its weight culturally and has long failed to make optimal use of its many natural advantages. John Duffus’s recent memoir, Backstage in Hong Kong, provides a blow-by-blow narrative as to why this has been, and arguably remains, the case.
It’s the early 2000s in Bombay. The air is damp, the streets are crowded, and hedonism abounds. The Enclave is Rohit Manchanda’s second novel, published long after the Betty Trask-winning A Speck of Coal Dust. It’s a propulsive, character-focused study of the growth of Indian liberalism that unwittingly sets a middle-aged woman, Maya, down a path of self-destruction.
Paul Bevan is the one of the most prominent scholars of early 20th-century Shanghai and it’s thanks to him that English language readers have learned of the contributions of Chinese illustrators, writers, publishers and other artists in late-Qing and Republican-era Shanghai. A few years ago, he translated a novel titled The Adventures of Ma Suzhen: An Heroic Woman Takes Revenge in Shanghai. This novel was originally written in the early 1920s, but takes place several decades before that.
Sikhism, born in India, about six centuries ago, is not a religion that has travelled far and wide the way Buddhism did in ancient times, and Hinduism continues to do even today through concepts of yoga, karma and so on. As the Sikh diaspora in the West struggles with its identity in contemporary times, there has been a deep interest in revisiting the roots of the community through pursuits in history and fiction. In The Sacred Hymns of Guru Nanak, Nirmal Gill approaches the subject of Sikh ethos and heritage through translation.
Nanako Hanada’s The Bookshop Woman chronicles the unique magic books have to connect people. In her 30s with her marriage and career on the brink, Nanako joins an online matching service that she refers to as PerfectStrangers. Though it resembles a dating site, it’s meant to connect people for thirty-minute conversations around shared interests. To make her profile stand out, she sets a goal to give personalized book recommendations to every person she meets through the site.
Melville Jacoby was a US war correspondent during the Sino-Japanese War and, later, the Second World War, writing about the Japanese advances from Chongqing, Hanoi, and Manila. He was also a relative of Bill Lascher, a journalist—specifically, the cousin of Bill’s grandmother.
In the opening short story of Ouyang Yu’s short story collection The White Cockatoo Flowers, the main character of the titular story asks himself: “If I were in China now, I would be…” The line sets the stage for a collection of stories that explore what it means to become Australian and the tensions of being part of —or between—multiple cultures.
There are any number of serious and worthy reasons to write a book on Alexander the Great, and author and historian Rachel Kousser gives several—including that Alexander’s world was more “globally connected” and “integrated” than our own and how “Alexander’s story does not just give us a different perspective on the past; it also helps us to imagine the future”—but one suspects that in the end it’s that Alexander’s is a ferociously good story. Kousser can be forgiven for that: Alexander has been considered the best of stories going on for 24 centuries. And she tells it well.
In the 1960s, bands of adventurous Filipinos found themselves spending years in communal, austere lifestyles while doing foreign aid work. They were healthcare workers, engineers, teachers, agriculturists, nutritionists. The existing model for international assistance during that period was Northern white rich to Southern black or brown. The Filipinos were going to do something else not tried before in Laos. It was an Asian-to-Asian effort that exemplified an interesting example of development aid unique in Lao history and perhaps in Philippine history.
Rogelio Sicat (or Sikat), often referred to as “one of the greatest pioneers of Philippine fiction”, along other young writers in the 1960s, chose to write in Tagalog in deliberate reaction to the literature written in English during the American occupation. Sixty years after his Bleeding Sun was written, this translation by his daughter Maria Aurora is a step towards making Sicat’s work more accessible.
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