There once was a tradition of storytelling that enthralled kings and beggars, mixing simple language and lofty poetry, while deploying ingenious tricks to retain the audience’s attention. Usually there were three or four stories embedded one within another, like a Russian doll. Just when you thought you were coming to a denouement, a new story began—more amazing and amusing than the last, and so you listened, fought off sleep or wine, and tried not to miss a word of the storyteller’s tale. The home of many of these fabulous tales is India, which gave the world the Panchatantra, and later inspired Rudyard Kipling’s Just So and the Jungle Book.
Those outside Iran are likely largely unfamiliar with the country’s art and culture of the 19th century, something easily remedied, however, by this very beautifully produced large-format book, packed with splendidly vivid color reproductions and lively analyses.
The ancient Greeks wrote extensively about their distaste for the opulence of the Persians of the Achemenid empire. However, archaeological evidence suggests that the Athenians were not themselves immune from luxury and even incorporated modes of Eastern opulence within their own cultural repertoire.
The Rohingya population, from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, are a community almost living entirely in exile, whether in refugee camps in Bangladesh, or working on boats throughout the Indian Ocean. The Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, is now the world’s largest.
“Everybody has their own Hong Kong story,” begins the introduction to Don Mak’s Once Upon a Hong Kong. Over a series of 18 illustrations, Mak has the opportunity to tell his story. Mak takes readers on a journey through daily Hong Kong life—from Hong Kong Park to Temple Street to Lantau Island.
Zhang Ling is so renowned a writer in China that one of her books was adapted to film as China’s first IMAX movie. She has written nine novels, as well as a number of collections of stories, all in Chinese. But Zhang Ling has not lived in China since the mid-1980s, when she immigrated to Canada. She started writing a decade later and has had at least one novel translated into English. But it’s only now that she has published a book in English. Where Waters Meet is a story centered around a family’s grief and takes place in Toronto and its surroundings, as well as various places in China, namely Wenzhou and Shanghai. The title of the book is taken from the large bodies of water that link these parts of the story together.
A shimmering, fairy-tale city of glass towers where nothing is quite as it seems: this is the vision of Hong Kong presented by award-winning writer Dorothy Tse in her first solo novel.
Sometimes one ends up reviewing the book one read rather than the one that was written. Lin Zhang’s The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy is more sociology than tech, more labor theory than business. But it is also a granular, grass-roots, bottom-up view of the past couple of decades of the development of China’s digital landscape. As such, she provides color and detail to the developments that have been covered in a far more generalized and ad hoc way as business stories.
Socialist women have been erased from the history of the international women’s movement. When we write them back in, and center Asia in the process, we arrive at a richer, more complex, and more accurate understanding of global feminisms.
Mai Nardone’s Welcome Me to the Kingdom opens with two migrants from Thailand’s northeast who travel to Bangkok to make a new life for themselves in the bustling city. As they enter, they pass under a sign, asking visitors to “Take Home a Thousand Smiles”. It’s an ironic start to their lives in Bangkok, as the two live an unstable, hardscrabble life on Bangkok’s fringes.
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