Chris Stowers, longtime photographer, credits a fellow journalist for the title of his latest memoir, Shoot, Ask … and Run. The journalist’s advice to a young Chris, just starting out, went like this. Shoot: Take the photo when the opportunity arises. Then, if someone notices that you took a photo, “ask” for permission to use the photo. Finally, if the subject seems annoyed, “run” … particularly if he or she has a gun.
Memoir
For many Asian families, it might be difficult not to have a memory of ginseng. I remember my mother making tea from American ginseng and my violin teacher using it to infuse his vodka. But I can’t remember ever asking about it or even why it was continually referred to as “American” ginseng, rather than just ginseng.
Kishore Mahbubani, longtime Singaporean diplomat and academic, opens his new memoir with a provocative line: “Blame it on the damn British.” Kishore, who later served as Singapore’s ambassador to the UN and founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, was born to poor migrants in Singapore, studied philosophy on a government scholarship—and from there, somehow got roped into the foreign service.
Beijing Bound captures a pivotal moment in China’s recent history through the lens of Glen Loveland, a young American who arrived in Beijing in 2007 with little more than ambition and a tourist visa. Once a congressional press secretary, Loveland chronicles his remarkable transformation from a bewildered expatriate to becoming the first foreign HR professional at China’s state broadcaster. His journey offers rare, firsthand insights into a China that was briefly—and tantalizingly—open to the world.
In 2019, journalist and writer Peter Hessler traveled with his family to China. He’d gotten a gig as a teacher of writing—nonfiction writing in particular—in what he’d hoped would be a sequel to his 2001 book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. But plans changed—radically. At the very end of 2019, the COVID-19 virus emerges in Wuhan, leading to chaos as officials frantically try to figure out how to control the new disease.
A much-loved memoir about a Japanese author’s relationship with her cat is translated into English for the first time by award-winning translator, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Writer Mayumi Inaba won many prizes for her stories and poems before her untimely death from cancer in 2014. She was well-known as a cat lover, particularly her calico, Mii. This modern classic—published as Mornings with My Cat Mii in Britain and forthcoming as Mornings without Mii in the US—describes the close bond they shared over the 20 years of Mii’s life.
For two decades, Singaporean diplomat and author Kishore Mahbubani has been a leading voice among a growing group of intellectuals and pundits publicizing the “Asian Twenty-First Century”, a triumphalist arc where Asian powers—especially a rising China—have cast off the shackles of Western colonialism to assume their “rightful” place atop in the global hierarchy of nations and civilizations. Mahbubani’s oeuvre, dominated by his series of bestsellers popularizing a tale of Western decline and Asia’s rise, has won recognition from a host of audiences ranging from American internationalists and Chinese nationalists.
Today, the Hong Kong Philharmonic is one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. But when John Duffus landed in Hong Kong in 1979 as the Philharmonic’s general manager—its fifth in as many years—he quickly learned just how much work needed to be done to make a Western symphony orchestra work in a majority Chinese city.
Chronic pain can be extremely frustrating to sufferers, especially as there are often no direct causes and can be hard to resolve. While pain may be linked to personal trauma, it can also extend to family and even historical events. In Nervous, Filipino-American writer Jen Soriano links all these in 14 thought-provoking, poignant personal essays about her childhood, family background, activism, and the Philippines, where her parents came from. In short, this is a book about personal, family and communal pain.
New Book Announcement: “Daughter of Dunhuang: A Memoir of a Mogao Grottoes Researcher” by Jinshi Fan
Fan Jinshi, a distinguished archaeologist, has devoted her life to safeguarding and researching the Mogao Caves, an esteemed UNESCO Heritage site nestled in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, and considered one of the world’s greatest archaeological discoveries. Her significant contributions to the field of Dunhuang studies and her advocacy for the protection and promotion of the caves’ cultural legacy have earned global accolades.
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