Laura Gao was born in Wuhan and spent her first four years with grandparents in China while her mother and father studied in the US. When she reunites with her parents, she finds herself in the strange land of Texas where teachers and new classmates can not pronounce her Chinese name, the only name she…
Felipe Fernández-Armesto doesn’t think much of Ferdinand Magellan. Particularly galling is that the famous explorer’s “renown seems impregnable” despite the fact that “his failure was total”.
On 9 September 2001, Ahmed Shah Massoud—called one of the greatest guerilla leaders in history, alongside names like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, was assassinated by two Al-Qaeda suicide bombers. Coming just two days before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Massoud’s assassination is thus one of those points in history that invites counter-factuals:…
Of all the three great sects of Zen in Japan, the Soto school is perhaps the best-known and most inclusive, admitting to its ranks lay people and women in addition to monks. It’s one of the most widely practiced forms of Buddhism in Japan, where there are reportedly nearly fourteen thousand temples dedicated to it….
This political biography of the current Indonesian President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, explains why his style is so successful and what his major undertakings as president have been. The stated aim of Jokowi and the New Indonesia by Darmawan Prasodjo with assistance from Tim Hannigan, is to give a full picture of the man…
At this time of shifting geopolitical relationships—“decoupling” between China and the US, rapprochement between China and Russia—it is unsurprising that the cultural and intellectual as well as political history of these relationships has attracted increasing attention. Recent volumes on Sino-Soviet “internationalist” interaction is now joined by Arise, Africa! Roar, China!, Gao Yunxiang’s recent study of…
Karen Cheung’s new book, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir, about growing up and coming of age in a city she feels is like no other, is characterized by a narrative style both intimate and candid. It’s hard to avoid being swept up by her story from the beginning as she describes the day…
As a counterpoint to the rich literature of Europeans discovering Asia, readers have access to many accounts by Asians about Europe. These writings hold up a mirror in front of their authors, who, unconsciously, reveal much about their own societies. Mehmed Effendi, the first Turkish ambassador to the court of Louis XV wrote in his…
In his new (but posthumous) memoir, Shanghai Jewish refugee Paul Hoffmann writes about his three most tumultuous experiences. One was enduring six months of Nazi Vienna, the other the terror inflicted by Sargent Kano Ghoya in the Shanghai Jewish Ghetto, and the third life under the new Chinese regime from 1949-1952. Much has been written…
One of the first members of Albert Samaha’s family introduced in his memoir Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes is his uncle Spanky: a baggage handler in San Francisco’s airport. Spanky emigrated to the United States from his home country, the Philippines, where he lived a very different life as a rockstar: one of the founding…
At the beginning of More Than One Child, Shen Yang writes, “I broke a law simply by being born.” She was her parents’ second daughter, and she is referring to the family planning laws which until recently saw China’s One-Child Policy strictly enforced. Her childhood was thus essentially intertwined with politics, but her memoir of…
Unlike most memoirs about the immigrant experience that center around overcoming hurdles to build a new life, Jolie Phuong Hoang instead structures Three Funerals For My Father: Love, Loss and Escape from Vietnam around her father’s death as he tries to escape Vietnam by boat in 1985. Her younger sister also drowned on that journey….
America’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power occurred after Sandy Gall wrote this fascinating book about the military exploits of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a mujahideen commander who fought against the Soviets in the 1980s and against the Taliban and its allies until his assassination…
Many Western entrepreneurs and businesses have foundered in trying to set up shop in China. Different expectations, different ways of doing business, different institutions and platforms—all come together to remove any pretensions that one can easily transplant a foreign business model into the Chinese market.
The story could be from Disney: in 1653, 14-year-old Venetian Nicolò Manucci, suffering from youthful wanderlust, stows away on a ship. Befriended (and hired) by an English nobleman (Henry Bard, Viscount of Bellomont) en route to Persia to solicit assistance from the Shah for exiled Charles II, he travels through the Ottoman Empire to Esfahan….