Tag
Southeast Asia
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“Origine Asiatique”: The Anticolonial and Communist Chinese That Flocked to Paris
Asian migration has been kept out of most official histories of Paris, but walking in the quartiers chics and populaires/mixtes uncovers a portrait of the lives and history.
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O My Swineherd!
The last century may have ushered in an epoch of wars that have no end, but Homer’s Odyssey continues to inspire. You do not have to be James Joyce or Derek Walcott to find the story of a man’s protracted struggle to return home from a fight he did not want appealing. With Odysseus Abroad,…
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Double Dirty Work: Sex Research and Symbolic Contamination
“Your skin is very dark,” a hostess in a Ho Chi Minh City bar complains to sociologist Kimberly Hoang. The woman has taken Hoang under her wing to help her become desirable to the bar’s Vietnamese clientele. “You need to buy foundation that will make you look lighter,” she adds. “You are lucky because you…
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Prajwal Parajuly and the Responsibilities of Fiction
“The Chaurasi is a curious event,” writes Prajwal Parajuly in the author’s note to his new novel, Land Where I Flee, “not many Nepali-speaking Hindus in India, especially people of my generation, know much about it.” In this teasing sentence, Parajuly, who has been hailed by the BBC as “The next big thing in South Asian…
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The Stranger’s Voice
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s riveting debut novel, is a chronicle of war wrapped in a spy thriller and tucked inside a confession. It is also a political satire, a send-up of Hollywood, and a scathing critique of mid-20th-century Orientalism. Nguyen juggles genres like so many flying AK-47s, and to dazzling, often hilarious effect. At…
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On Pansodan Road: The Second-Hand Books of Yangon
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Some names in this piece have been changed to protect privacy. It’s a Sunday morning, and the light first falls on the squatters who have built their homes on the roof of the colonial telegraph building, an edifice…
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Kim Thúy: A Way with Words
Over the past five years, Kim Thúy has become one of the best known and most celebrated francophone writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. Born in 1968, Thúy fled Vietnam by boat at the age of 10. After four months in a Malaysian refugee camp, she and her family immigrated to Quebec, where Thúy came to…
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Caught in the Game
The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh devotes just over a minute of his documentary, The Missing Picture (released in the US in March), to the work of Ang Saroeung, a Khmer Rouge cameraman who filmed the fields of Democratic Kampuchea as they were—barren—and the glorious “new people” of the nation as they were—starving and devastated. When…
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Megalopolis Now
It is no surprise that New York City, immodestly known as “the capital of the world,” figures so strongly in the popular imagination of apocalypse: think of the submerged Statue of Liberty in the ecodisaster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004). But New York’s iconicity, as a prime example of what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls…
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Up from the Shadows
“Aren’t archives supposed to be forever? Well, forever’s a meaningless concept in Asia. Here, only the present is eternal.” So we read early on in Sandi Tan’s debut novel, The Black Isle, a supernatural romance that spans 1920s Shanghai, a World War II–era South Sea island, and modern-day Japan. The novel opens in 2010 Tokyo…
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Revolution Amnesia
Philippine National Book Award–recipient Gina Apostol is a novelist with a penchant for unlikely heroes. Gun Dealers’ Daughter, her American debut, is no exception. The bulk of the novel offers the confession of Soledad Soliman, or “Sol,” a wealthy young woman turned communist rebel who had participated in a murder plot against an American counterinsurgency…
