“The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear” by Nan Z Da
Nan Z Da has been teaching Shakespeare’s play King Lear, she says, for more than six years. One cannot help but envy her students.
Podcast with Paul French, author of “Destination Macao”
Macau—onetime Portuguese colony, now casino hotspot—has long captured the imaginations of travelers, reporters, artists and writers. The city served as the only gateway to China for centuries; then, after the rise of Hong Kong, its slightly seedier vibe made it a popular setting for books, articles and movies exploring the more criminal elements of society.
“Old Kiln” by Jia Pingwa
Mud, blood, farts and plenty of swearing: esteemed author Jia Pingwa minutely details the brutal reality of peasant life in this magnum opus set during the Cultural Revolution.
“Gingko Season” by Naomi Xu Elegant
The American expat-in-Asia novel has been done so many times it’s practically its own genre, but the inverse is almost unheard of—until now. Naomi Xu Elegant’s debut novel, Gingko Season, is a witty, humorous and clever story of twenty-five-year-old Penelope Lin, an expat from Beijing who navigates adulthood alongside a diverse cast of friends.
Podcast with Zev J Handel “Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese” by Zev J Handel
For centuries, scribes across East Asia used Chinese characters to write things down–even in languages based on very different foundations than Chinese. In southern China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, people used Chinese to read and write–and never thought it was odd. It was, after all, how things were done.
“Wonders of Imperial Carpets” at the Palace Museum
The new exhibit at Hong Kong’s Palace Museum is somewhat undersold by its title: “Wonders of Imperial Carpets”. There are indeed carpets—marvelous and quite extraordinary carpets—but the lesson of the exhibition—that of the two-way artistic and cultural influence between China and Islamic world—is mostly carried in the other exhibits, the bronzes, pottery, books, drawings and…
“Ryu” by Akira Higashiyama
The ghosts of those wronged in war invariably call out for vengeance. When the conflict is a civil war, all the more so. Families may be split apart, feuds started, and children called upon to settle scores they weren’t alive to start. The civil war that swept through China from 1927 to 1949 is no…
“Tianjin Cosmopolis: An Alternative History of Globalization” by Pierre Singaravélou
In his book Tianjin Cosmopolis, Pierre Singaravélou remarks that “The history of modernity is a history of possible futures as much as a study of the processes of modernization.” Thanks to a new translation from the original French, English readers now have a chance to consider one possible future of China that never came to…
Podcast with John Man, author of “Conquering the North: China, Russia, Mongolia: 2,000 Years of Conflict”
China, famously, built the Great Wall to defend against nomadic groups from the Eurasian steppe. For two millennia, China interacted with groups from the north: The Xiongnu, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Russians. They defended against raids, got invaded by the north, and tried to launch diplomatic relations.
New Book Announcement: “China’s Church Divided: Bishop Louis Jin and the Post-Mao Catholic Revival” by Paul P Mariani
An illuminating portrait of how Shanghai’s Catholic community surged back to life after the Cultural Revolution—and of a Church divided between allegiance to the Vatican and loyalty to the Communist party-state.
“Mending Bodies” by Hon Lai Chu
Fifteen years have passed between the publication of Hon Lai Chu’s 《缝身》 (“Seam”) and Mending Bodies, its English translation by Jacqueline Leung. Readers who feel those years mark a drift toward dystopia may detect the eerie touch of prophecy in Hon’s writing. Yet she also digs into human problems with neither expiration date nor borders.
“Rabbit Moon” by Jennifer Haigh
A midnight phone call can mean one of three things: a wrong number, a robocall or a terrible emergency. When suburban Bostonian, Claire Litvak receives a phone call from someone at the American consulate in Shanghai, it’s of the third variety: her daughter Lindsey is in the hospital on life support after she was hit…
A Female Embroiderer in the Qing Court: excerpt from “Women of Chinese Modern Art” by Doris Sung
In its 1911 inaugural issue, the Women’s Eastern Times (Funü shibao) printed a composite photograph of embroiderer Shen Shou (1874–1921) together with her work—an embroidered portrait of the Italian queen Elena of Montenegro (1871–1952). A caption slip pasted onto the embroidery states: “Commendation from the Empress Dowager to bestow [upon her] the character ‘Shou’ [longevity]…
Podcast with Lizhi Liu, author of “From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China”
Alibaba. Tencent. JD. Pinduoduo. Run down the list of China’s most valuable companies and you’ll find, for the most part, that they’re all e-commerce companies—or at least facilitate e-commerce. The sector created giants: Alibaba grew from just 5.5 billion renminbi of revenue in 2010 to 280 billion last year.
“Transplants” by Daniel Tam-Claiborne
The increasing number of memoirs and novels set in China over the past couple of decades fall into two broad buckets. A handful of Americans taught English in China and returned to write memoirs around the same time as Chinese immigrants to the US and UK began to find success as fiction writers, both in…
