I read so many excellent books that it’s hard to name a favourite, but seeing as I so often ask people to recommend a book they’ve read recently and to also choose an all-time favourite, it’s only fair I answer these questions myself. My all-time pick is Nostromo, Joseph Conrad’s [...]
Ever visited places on your overseas travels and felt that you were ten or twenty years too late? I have, often, but not with China. I first went there in 1995 and it was bad enough; a decade or two earlier would have meant even dirtier toilets, even worse transportation, [...]
Late at night and easing your way through a bottle, have you ever been blessed by a flash of literary genius? Perhaps an idea for a novel, let’s say, a Sherlock Holmes story set in Asia? Alas, you’re hardly halfway through the celebratory follow-up bottle when a few cursory internet [...]
We’ve all seen pictures featuring the giant portrait of Mao Zedong in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking Tiananmen Square. But this kind of imagery is surprisingly rare; one of the reasons that particular portrait is so overused is the lack of alternatives to photograph. Forty years after [...]
On Amazon (but not the book itself) this self-published teaching memoir has the subtitle: “I spent one year teaching ESL in Asia, so you don't have to.” Similarly, a black-hearted reviewer might be tempted to write that he read the book so you don’t have to. However, my policy on [...]
Name three famous Mongolians. The first two are easy enough: Genghis Khan – arguably the most important man of the last millennium – and then his grandson Kublai Khan, but who else? Into this biographical void comes American journalist Michael Kohn’s Lama of the Gobi, bringing to life an extraordinary [...]
Between the time when the Maoist stranglehold loosened and the rise of the globalized Internet-connected China, there was an age of undreamed-of possibilities. And unto this came American musician Dennis Rea like a time traveller from the future, guitar in hand, bearing the dubious gifts of progressive rock and free [...]
Japan and America (1916) is a forceful warning about Japan’s diplomatic duplicity and its expansionist plans. Carl Crow (1883–1945), an American newspaperman based in Shanghai, was vehemently anti-Japan, but his strident tone seems justified given how subsequent events unfolded. He ends the book with a prophetic prediction: In their hearts [...]
Californian Ken Berglund spent four and a half years in Taiwan working as an English teacher, the subject of his first book, An American Teacher in Taiwan (read my review of the book here). He married a local lass, had two kids, and then moved back to America with his [...]
It’s easy to forget how overwhelming the first days of your new life in Asia can be; the crushing language barrier makes simple things like ordering a meal an ordeal; learning to navigate the public transportation system happens one mistake at a time; and that “easy to find” job can [...]