Laid low by a mystery ailment and sleepless nights, I was struggling to get through my to-do list, top of which this sat Larry Feign’s pirate saga The Flower Boat Girl. Oh well, if Robert Louis Stevenson could write Treasure Island while bedridden, then I could at least read and review [...]
China is not usually associated with horses – well, other than being an agrarian civilisation long in opposition to the nomadic horse peoples of Central Asia – and yet it has a rich equestrian history and culture, as detailed in breadth and depth in Yin Hung Young’s The Horses of [...]
Tales of Ming Courtesans is a moving story about the strength of female friendships. The novel, set in the tumultuous last years of the Ming dynasty, follows the fortunes of three girls, all victims of the flesh trade, who, through their beauty and talents, become celebrated courtesans. They form a sworn sisterhood [...]
On a bitterly cold December morning in 1932, in the frontier city of Kalgan (Zhangjiakou), which lies about two hundred kilometers northwest of Peking, a young protestant missionary couple passed through the chaotic city streets and gates. In two horse-drawn carts, they joined a caravan of camels and carts wending [...]
I was recently working on a book chapter about Western authors who had lived in pre-communist Peking – the likes of Edmund Backhouse, George Kates, Harold Acton, David Kidd – and I was struggling to come up with an interesting frame. Rather than a straightforward series of chronological biographies, I [...]
Nonlocal, an intense, quirky work of literary fiction, is the story of two men a generation apart in age, and how their lives interact and their stories overlap and echo. There is Korean American Kohlhaas, who I assume is about eighteen years old, straddling two identities (American and Korean), at [...]
The Three Tigers, One Mountain title is a twist on an old Chinese saying that “two tigers cannot share the same mountain,” while the subtitle, A Journey Through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea, and Japan, gives an accurate description of the contents. This pairing of the poetic and the [...]
Ray Hecht was born in Israel, raised in the American Midwest, and lived in China for many years. He now calls Taiwan home. He’s written seven books, including South China Morning Blues (published by Blacksmith Books and reviewed on Bookish Asia back in 2015). His latest work is Always Goodbye, an [...]
When it comes to travel writing, China’s immense size can be overwhelming. Solutions include focusing on a small town and its hinterland, or – at the other extreme – covering every province. A good compromise is taking a transect across the country, whether that thread be a river, a highway, [...]
The Pearl of the Orient, the Paris of the East – Shanghai of the 1920s to 1949 has long captivated readers as one of history’s great cities; it’s been a first-choice setting for China fiction and non-fiction. Is there room on the shelf for yet another title? Yes, if the [...]