“Stories of the Sahara” by Sanmao
At first hearing, Stories of the Sahara sounds improbable: about a half-century ago, a young Chinese woman from Taiwan decamps to El Aaiún in the then Spanish Sahara.
“The Magical Language of Others” by EJ Koh
Eun Ji Koh was a typical Californian teenager before her immigrant parents surprised Koh and her brother with some startling news. Her father had been offered a far more lucrative job back in Seoul than he could ever expect to be offered in the US. It isn’t uncommon for immigrants to return to their countries…
Aeneas Anderson and Isabella Bird: Travelers in China
Earnshaw Books, an independent publisher specializing in China matters, has recently issued two books featuring westerners sojourning in China over a period of a century and a half. Frances Wood, a respected scholar of Chinese history, presents the account of Aeneas Anderson, who served as a valet to Lord Macartney when the latter led an…
“Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA” by Amaryllis Fox
As Amaryllis Fox’s memoir opens, she is walking through the back alleys of Karachi when she senses a man following her. What she doesn’t write then is that she has an infant daughter back home in Shanghai, cared for by her CIA undercover agent husband. Fox is also an undercover CIA agent but one who…
New Book Announcement: “An American Bum in China” by Tom Carter
An American Bum in China: Featuring the bumblingly brilliant escapades of expatriate Matthew Evans is the remarkable but true story of an Iowan misfit. At the age of twenty-one, cancer survivor Evans flees his Mississippi River hometown of Muscatine and heads to China in pursuit of love. He ends up destitute, deported, working as a…
New Book Announcement: “The Boundless Sea: Self and History” by Gary Okihiro
The last book in a trilogy of explorations on space and time from a preeminent scholar, The Boundless Sea is Gary Y Okihiro’s most innovative yet. Whereas Okihiro’s previous books, Island World and Pineapple Culture, sought to deconstruct islands and continents, tropical and temperate zones, this book interrogates the assumed divides between space and time,…
New Book Announcement: “The Only Man Dressing for Dinner: Beijing 1900” by Giuseppe Salvago Raggi
A translation from Italian of the memoirs of Giuseppe Salvago Raggi, minister of Italy in Beijing from 1898 until 1902. In 1900, Raggi, his wife and child, lived through the 55 days of the Siege of the Legations. This book contains the section of memoirs related to his service in China, just before and after…
“All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents” by Mieke Eerkens
Relatively little had been written about Indonesia during World War II and the conflict between the Dutch and Japanese in the Pacific. In her recent memoir, All Ships Follow Me, Mieke Eerkens starts with the complexity of her father’s upbringing in colonial Indonesia. The son of a Dutch family that had lived in what was…
“Betwixt and Between” by Margaret Sun & “Shanghai Daisy” by Daisy Kwok
There always comes a time when, as people age, events move from being “within living memory” to “history”. There is even more urgency to capture these voices in a place like China where, for reasons of war and turmoil, fewer voices were, on the whole, captured at the time.
“Women’s Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home” by Megan K Stack
A war correspondent and overseas bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, Megan K Stack never had much occasion to concern herself with gender equality even when she married another foreign correspondent and the two moved to Beijing a decade ago. But their marital dynamics changed when Stack became pregnant. She quit her job and…
“Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells” by Pico Iyer
“Hold this moment for ever, I tell myself. It may never come again.” This last sentence of Autumn Light recalls a poem by Shakespeare’s friend and collaborator John Fletcher, who observed, so many years before Weep no more, nor sigh, nor groan, Sorrow calls no time that’s gone.
“Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China” by Karoline Kan
Under Red Skies is being plugged as the first English-language memoir by a Chinese millennial, which already sets it apart from other books about China’s younger generation. Books like Alec Ash’s Wish Lanterns or Zak Dychtwald’s Young China, for all of their merits, were written by expats. In contrast, Chinese-born Karoline Kan tells the story…
New Book Announcement: “The Same Moon: A Memoir” by Sarah Coomber
Recently wed—and quickly divorced—twenty-four-year-old Sarah Coomber escapes the disappointments of her Minnesota life for a job teaching English in Japan. Her plan is to use the year to reflect, heal and figure out what to do with her wrecked life while enjoying the culture of the country where she had previously spent a life-changing summer…
“The Fourth String: A Memoir of Sensei and Me” by Janet Pocorobba
“Sensei”, a diminutive older woman, teaches Janet Pocorobba how to play the shamisen, a traditional three-stringed Japanese instrument. It is hard to tune and exactly how much “ma” or dead space to leave between the notes is constantly vexing. Sensei is of the view that the shamisen, and traditional music in general, is much neglected…
“A Path Twice Traveled: My Journey as a Historian of China” by Paul A Cohen
“I certainly was not born to history,” Paul Cohen tells us at the very beginning of his book; indeed he wasn’t. He didn’t want to follow his father’s men’s clothing trade, and gave up engineering after one year in university to study the humanities, and even then he did not concentrate on any one part…
