I vividly remember the day my father announced that we were going to move. I was six, and we were sitting round the dinner table in our house in Dublin. As we finished our food he calmly told us that we would be leaving Ireland, destined for Hong Kong. I [...]
In 2009 the “Ghost City” of Ordos was discovered by the global media. Here, in a lonely desert expanse, a massive new city, said to be built for a million people, lay eerily quiet and empty. There were brand-new apartment blocks, whole suburbs of upmarket homes, and a massive public [...]
The epic adventure The Rose of Tibet is a stunning work from a largely forgotten writer. Lionel Davidson would make any shortlist for the best thriller writer of the last sixty years whom you’ve never heard of, let alone read. Of his eight novels, three won the prestigious Gold Dagger [...]
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.) This book on China and the Chinese will contain no apologies. It will present no strenuous effort, where uncomplimentary revelations are made, to drag in some supposedly extenuating or counterbalancing virtue possessed by the [...]
In Tiger Tail Soup, Seattle-born Nicki Chen delivers a story of eternal hope, a peaceful life derailed, and womanhood attained in a time of war. The novel begins in 1946 with her Chinese protagonist, young mother Han An Lee, traveling by sedan chair north of Xiamen, through the vast mountains [...]
Banal as it is to say, China’s changing. Ever since Deng Xiaoping’s historic “Reform and Opening” policy, the country has embarked on more than three decades of unprecedented growth. It is a country riddled with contradictions; it’s also one that, in many ways, defies explanation. Fortunately, in his new book, [...]
Are foreign English teachers in Asia losers? The usual caveats aside about the unfairness of painting whole swathes of a population with such broad strokes, yes, there are enough deadbeats to justify the stereotype. I recall my first day at an upmarket exam prep school in Taipei, the director explaining [...]
What’s the laziest way of writing a book? Throw together your blog posts or diary entries? No, that still requires you to have written something. An anthology? And one from a writer’s group or “colony.” Fiction or non-fiction, no problem, and let the laziest artists submit poems: “I’m still working [...]
It all started with a sex-crazed American expat asking an unsuspecting Hong Kong woman to strip. Well, kind of. Cartoonist Larry Feign had just moved to Hong Kong, and he and his wife, Cathy, were in the kitchen cooking. Feign asked her in Cantonese if she wanted some “choi sum” [...]
How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia explores the feminine side of expat life. Edited by Hong Kong-based writer Shannon Young, the anthology covers the stories of 26 women, mostly split between China, Hong Kong and Japan (from Tokyo to Fukushima), and differs [...]