As Albert Samaha’s memoir, Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes, begins, he hears from his mother that she’s being scammed by a man she met online. He and his mother view American politics very differently: she’s a Trump supporter and he’s progressive. In his narrative about Philippine history, American colonialism, immigration law, and his own family’s…
In the annals of Russian and Soviet literature and drama, Sergei Tretyakov is not perhaps the first name on the list. He remains, says Robert Leach, “curiously elusive”. Yet he was “absolutely at the heart of avant-garde modernism”, collaborating closely with Sergei Eisenstein, “one of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s most intimate associates” and an influence…
This book is much more than the memoir of the scholar who has been hailed as the most important living Chinese historian of our times—it is also an invaluable record of a history of our times, witnessing the cultural, political, and social transformations of what Professor Yü Ying-shih notes as the period of the most…
Lyn Innes, Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, is the great-granddaughter of the last Nawab of Bengal, Mansour Ali Khan. In this family memoir, she vividly brings the period to life through the stories of her antecedents, using both family history and source materials from the time, while giving a fascinating…
At the start of Ira Sukrungruang’s new book, This Jade World, he’s about to meet a new woman in a hotel room while his wife is packing her things to walk out on their marriage. This is going to be an open and honest memoir, a journey that will conclude with lessons learned and a…
It wasn’t unusual in the 1980s and 90s for parents in China to leave their kids behind with grandparents in search of economic opportunities overseas. Anna Qu was one, and only reunited with her mother in New York at age seven after a five-year separation. A not unusual story then, up to a point: Qu…
When Kat Chow was a girl, her mother once joked about being preserved by taxidermy after she dies so that her family will still have her around. Not long after, she succumbs to cancer, leaving grief in her wake. Grief pervades the immigrant story of Kat Chow’s new memoir, Seeing Ghosts. Although most of the…
This story of business in China starts, alarmingly, with a hostage-taking over a commercial dispute. But rather than launching into a tale of business noir, the author admits that, well, the hostage-taker had a point: he had not in fact been paid.
Australian broadcast journalist Mimi Kwa comes from a lineage going back to imperial Beijing. In her new family memoir, House of Kwa, she tells the remarkable story that brought her father’s family to Southern China, Hong Kong, and Western Australia.
Anne Liu Kellor’s mother was born in Chongqing during World War II, moved around mainland China during the civil war, and fled to Hong Kong with her family in 1950 before settling in Taiwan. Kellor herself grew up in Seattle in a mixed race household. Her Chinese grandmother helped raise her, keeping her hearing and…
The story of Alexander the Great has inspired conquerors and would-be conquerors throughout history. Alexander’s sweep through the Middle East and Central Asia left behind evidence of his mark on history—namely, in the several cities that he founded, and that sprung up to govern the kingdoms he left behind.
Polly Barton is a Japanese-English translator with an extraordinary output, including three novel-length projects published in English translation in the last eighteen months. Fifty Sounds is her memoir, chronicling her year teaching English on Japan’s remote Sado Island and the way it changed the trajectory of her life.
If you are in Tokyo and you’re riding on the Yamanote Line, you are likely heading to one of the major shopping destinations on that line, such as Shibuya, Shinagawa, or Tokyo Station. If you are going to Tokyo Station, you will pass through Komagome, once a place in the country where people had villas…
“Deconstructing the layout of China was difficult, but food showed me the way.” At the Chinese Table is memoir by Carolyn Phillips, whose previous book cataloguing 35 regional cuisines of China was nominated for a James Beard award. Books on Chinese cuisine abound, and recently Fuschia Dunlop lay claim to being the Westerner most embedded…
Moïse de Camondo came from one of the most prominent Jewish families in 19th-century Constantinople, but in 1869 at the age of nine he moved with his family to a new promised land for Jews: Paris. At the conclusion of the French Revolution almost a century earlier, France became the only nation in Europe to…