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This engrossing work continues Professor Donnithorne’s role as an honest and effective protagonist of China. That brilliant and assiduous scholar has again enhanced our understanding of the country, chronologically recording her life experiences with an insightfulness that makes reading the book highly rewarding.
And I never thought this day would come, but here I am, sitting in front of the ritual fire, repeating Sanskrit mantras I don’t understand. He’s looking at me now, and I can feel it on my skin. We are getting married. Damini is locked away somewhere in a room, Lakshmi’s at Lord Krishna’s feet in the heavens, and I’m going to be his wife...
‘We have yellow skin and black hair. We are called the descendants of the dragon,’ Xi Jinping told Donald Trump during the American president’s 2017 visit to Beijing. A Westerner might have trouble deciding whether Xi’s remark was intended as profound or just amusing, but hesitation in the reader’s judgement is part of the ride through this 160-page collection of quotes and excerpts from the mind of China’s current leader.
Anwar Sadat died on the very day he arrived in Jakarta from Semarang. He was twenty-eight. Naming his son Anwar, after Egyptian President Muhammad Anwar El Sadat, his father had his reasons for choosing that name and not Gamal Abdul Nasser or Husni Mubarak. A week before the birth of Anwar from Semarang, Sadat the president had been assassinated by one of his own soldiers. According to the news reports, the death could have been avoided if Anwar Sadat had agreed to wear a bulletproof vest, as recommended by his advisors. He refused, saying that bulletproof vests were for pussies.
I felt embarrassed. Never in my whole life had anyone asked me my name. People just called me Lus’ Sister. And I would understand that it was me they were referring to, even though I had my own name, which seemed foreign to me because nobody ever called me by it. And so, when the pretty woman asked me my name, well, to be honest, I was a bit shy about telling her.
Usually the birds would come to perch and sing in large shady trees or on the roofs of homes with infants who were still breastfeeding, or mothers in late pregnancy. When the target baby cried, that was when the birds would snatch the unfortunate child’s aura and fly off with it far away, soaring high into the grey supernatural heavens. The baby would immediately sicken, its body slowly turning blue and eventually dying.
Let’s go out to sea, my child. It is time. I sense them coming closer. I can hear faint echoes of voices drifting in the dawn wind. Listen: this early morn, the wind comes not softly in rustles, but hissing and slashing along the road. It is screeching through the aching joints of the windowpane, whistling through the cracks of the squeaking door, rushing chill, enclosing the house in cold. The candle stirs as if scratched: blazing awhile, blinking awhile. Harsh dark is forcing its way in through every hole.
The sky is red. A naga swoops down, sweeping the stars and the sun. Sparks illuminate the tips of its wings. Fire spreads. Wind swirls. Fear shoots into the air like octopus’ ink. Armour-clad warriors lie sprawled on the ground. Screams of desperation fill the air. The creature is incensed. Houses, trees, distant mountaintops: everything disintegrates into unrecognisable rubble. Razed to the ground. Everything. Except for one child standing upright, motionless. He holds a tautly strung bow in his hand. His face is as dark as stone, but his eyes are as bright as lightning. It is from his bow that a great arrow was shot and has penetrated the naga’s chest.
This is my biggest chance. The words seemed to make every cell in Dani’s brain seize up. Trembling all over, he followed the shopkeeper upstairs. The stairs were of solid boards, old ones which made an odd squeaking sound when stepped on. On the top floor in the gloom he was greeted by the sight of a doorway into an ancient burial cave, the staring eyes of tau-tau effigies looking like they were soaring upwards towards death...
In the end, my friend reported, she was taken back to her house and dropped off as if nothing had happened. Since that time, she has been living normally, with no outward sign to mark that strange occurrence. The only telling sign is a look in her eyes which, when we exchange glances, makes me feel as if I am being drawn into a whirlwind.
At first, of course, there hadn’t been any plan to cheat anyone. That idea came spontaneously. That afternoon, Hisam, along with over a hundred others, had accompanied the remains of Salim Gurame, a villager who had died the previous night, to the Kober cemetery. Hisam had actually not been keen on going along to the cemetery. After paying his respects at the funeral home and saying a prayer over the body at the Nurul Huda Mosque, he had intended to go straight home. He wanted to shut himself away there for the whole day. He craved an extended period of time without human contact. It was only the uncomfortable thought of the neighbours’ comments that persuaded him to join in the funeral procession.
At that time, the ship that brought me from Lamuri had just docked. From the Malabar harbour I was to continue my journey to Istanbul by land. My father, the harbourmaster of Lamuri, doubted his sixteen-year-old child could proceed with the journey alone. A colleague of his, Hamzah by name, would be waiting for me at the harbour and would guide me until I was ensured a safe arrival at the gate of the School of Navigation in Istanbul...
That was approximately the start of the story Zara intended to write for Fayza, one that might take the form of a novel – or perhaps even a trilogy – requiring many years for her to complete.
When my mother died, her face changed. I was the first to notice. When other family members and friends came to pay their respects, what I saw in their eyes was doubt; none could believe that the deceased was my mother. Even my brother, who hadn’t seen my mother alive for three years, as soon as he saw the corpse, straightaway announced that the deceased was our aunt, the youngest girl in my mother’s family. The doctors and nurses who had cared for Mother when she was in the hospital were also surprised; no one could believe their eyes.
It was darker now and pouring with rain, and the first heads of her black tulips bent as if in mourning. Her mother had warned her against planting tulips. They were weak and unaccustomed to wet weather. After her mother died Edith made sure she filled her borders with tulip bulbs.
Ma Jian is one of the sharpest contemporary Chinese writers. Sharp, because his prose is like a Chinese cleaver dripping an aged, black vinegar. In China Dream he portrays the country in a witty, extravagant, and satirical vein. The interaction between the social and the literary, combined with the meanings of dreams, compels the author to compose a bold, two-layered narrative that travels seamlessly between the present and the time of the Cultural Revolution. Ma Jian’s realism is brutal and violent. Nevertheless, despite the cruelty and crudity featured in China Dream, I laughed from page one.
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The cover art for this issue is by Ramona Galardi: 'Pink Bamboo' (front, mixed media) and 'Conversation with a Tree' (back, collage and mixed media on vintage sheet music). Her work is featured on Saatchi Art and on Instagram at Ramona_Galardi.
Images © Ramona Galardi and published in Asia Literary Review Issue 35 with kind permission of the artist.
To get a taste of what's in ALR35, expand this link to see our selection of free-to-view articles on the ALR34 Contents page. A good place to begin is From the Editors.
Then explore our interview with Anuradha Roy, who has just been announced winner of the 2018 TATA Book of the Year Award for Fiction.
There's lots of fiction, and we feature stories set in India, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, the US and North Korea. Read Zach Macdonald's A Happy Ending - a harrowing counterpoint to cheerful media reports about the Korean peninsula. Finally, sample some of the issue's poetry with Kunwar Narain and Katherine Wu - and there's more in Preview.
... Andrew de Mello, who years ago
was notorious for sometimes dressing as a Sioux chieftain
and who is now in red vest and matching jeans,
his rockers’ haircut seventies-style. Face lit by
his laptop screen, he’s crooning obscure ballads
to a poppy backing-track, being timeless, Portuguese,
and at home.
Aunty Sumana’s Flushing seethed with thieves. The stores along Union Street robbed her blind on calling cards, the ladies outside Macy’s nearly filched her purse while trying to sell her a worse-looking one. The chicken-over-rice guys diddled her out of fair portions. Men lurked in the shadows, ready to murder her in cold blood and run away with her cane. Flushing mirrored Gotham City before Batman, Bombay in the days of Varadarajan, the Tamil gangster. The upshot was that Meera had resigned to fetching her aunt from the subway station.
This story has a happy ending, but first Ye-lim must crawl on her belly through a swamp of icy mud. The mud is viscous and sucking, calling her to join the grave of those who came to this place before her. There are bones: a femur here, shards of what may be skull there. Human or animal, she can’t tell about the skull shards. She finds a tooth, its enamel yellowed like an old corn kernel, embedded in the muck that squelches between her raw fingers. It reminds her of the teeth on the man – a soldier – who shattered her father’s body.
Chan Lai-tai tugged at her skirt belt as she readied herself for work. No way to cinch it tighter. Should losing only five pounds make such a difference?
Xiong would repay her today. He had brought it up this morning, the only thing he said after kissing her, just before dashing out to catch the early train to Guangzhou. Never time to make love when he was in a hurry. Did he remember his keys? He’d left a set in Guangzhou last trip, and she’d had to scramble to make him a new one. So forgetful! But that wasn’t important because something else nagged. What?
It was important that the prostitute be foreign, ideally newly arrived, not conversant in Japanese. Shimoyama wished to keep talk to a minimum. Furthermore, a foreigner would have more of an enterprising nature – or perhaps, as he was coldly aware, be economically deprived of choice – to agree to the service he desired.
It was a wonder how the bird got in, considering that the shaft was covered with a special bird mesh. It could be inferred that the pigeon had been looking for a safe place to lay her eggs and, in her quest for childbearing privacy, had torn through the mesh.
The bird was noisy. It cooed without pause, its cooing growing louder with every passing minute.
Even when the stand was kicked out from under it, the marionette remained in place – with its hands and feet thrown up in mid-air. At the sight of this miracle, you’d expect that the onlookers would have jumped back in amazement. But aside from a few children and childlike adults, the crowd showed only polite appreciation and continued on their way. It must have been utterly devastating to the boy running the puppet show. For when people don’t even take a passing interest in the greatest of miracles, what is the poor miracle maker to do?
I was born at a strange hour. It was a Friday night. All was quiet in the village of Mihalpur and, I believe, within the small one-room hut, too. The threadbare curtains must have been closed. I am told that my mother never held me, and I suspect that she never looked into my face. A girl child. I can see her now, dark like me, her long hair matted with the sweat of labour, curled up in a corner on a hard, bare cot as tears leak down the sides of her face, limp with exhaustion and misery. That particular sequence of events is not such a mystery to me. I saw it happen many times, with other women. I was the silent witness.
Kuala Lumpur. KL. Kala Lumpa or Kala Lampur to the white man, the Mat Sallehs. City of sinners and sex. Sodom and Gomorrah. It was 1998, and the city was the ‘party central’ of Asia. Of the world. Drugs had opened up the minds of this one-time placid society and bayed in a new revolution, in a time when people hungered for freedom from authoritarian politicians, from the police, from their mindless jobs, from themselves.
I was in a top-floor unit of a fifteen-storey apartment building with a view of nothing but identical apartment buildings, sitting on a living-room sofa with a Maltese puppy on my lap, folding and unfolding its left ear repeatedly, the dog gazing up at me expressionlessly as I gazed back at it. Before being on my lap, the dog had been lying on its stomach on the living room floor. The dog had not ended up on my lap of its own volition, because it was still too young to get up on the sofa without someone’s help. From the sofa, I had half-heartedly picked up the dog and placed it on my lap, gazed down at it for a moment and, as if I had suddenly thought of origami, I had begun folding and unfolding its ear, like I was doing origami.
As we go to press, Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived has just been announced winner of the 2018 TATA Book of the Year Award for fiction. One of India’s most successful and prominent writers, she is no stranger to literary acclaim. An Atlas of Impossible Longing and The Folded Earth won prizes and praise internationally, and in 2015 she was longlisted for the Booker with Sleeping on Jupiter, which went on to win the 2016 DSC South Asian Prize.
Recently, the Asia Literary Review’s Anurima Roy (no relation) caught up with Anuradha Roy to talk about her experiences as a publisher and writer, her sources of inspiration, her previous books, and about how she came to write All the Lives We Never Lived.
While the tumble of past, present and future often confuses the issue of whether any progress is truly being made, the indomitable human qualities of imagination and perseverance occasionally coalesce to snap the pattern. The breakouts, we hope, may then lead to a future that is brighter and, dare we hope, more fulfilling.
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IT WAS RAINING on the morning I was scheduled to die, a deluge that had begun in the late watches of the night. I had not slept, having spent the night thinking of the last time I had seen my father, six months before. I heard the rain riding in on the winds of the South China Sea, the sheaves of water thrashing across the rutted runway, hitting the rattan walls and the thatched roofs of the pilots' billets, so different from the gentle summer rains of my homeland.
Joint winners of the ALR / LTIK 2018 Korean Literature Essay Competition were announced on Wednesday 27 June at the Korean Cultural Centre in London.
100 Great Indian Poems is a collection spanning three millennia and twenty-eight of India's languages, and includes poems that will be unknown to the most avid readers, as well as work by writers familiar to the world.
Edited by Abhay K. and available from 10 February 2018, 100 Great Indian Poems is published by Bloomsbury India and available on Amazon.
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Americans, I have noticed, are fools for homelands – especially the homelands of others. To determine a person’s provenance is as important to them as it is to the Chinese to determine a person’s worth. And to Americans like Will, who have escaped their own homelands, proudly calling themselves ‘expats’, it seems even more important to repatriate everyone else.
I was reporting on India’s 2014 general election, the one that would bring a tough-talking man named Narendra Modi to power. Sultanpur was a dingy, noisy town with narrow streets, filled with honking motorcycles and stray cows and donkeys eating garbage. Outside the congested lanes of the town, the country roads were potholed and meandered through villages with names like Teergaon and Isouli. Men here wore white turbans and women arranged their saris to veil their faces and buffalos dozed placidly in village ponds. This was what journalists always called the 'heartland of India'. It was my first time in the heart of the heartland. Born and raised in metropolitan Kolkata, I already felt like a fish out of water here.
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‘It’s nothing to do with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. We just want to support our football club,’ one of the supporters told me with a broad marzipan smile. It was like visiting a film studio and wandering off a Southeast Asia set onto another recreating the deserts of Arabia. Over coffee in a restaurant overlooking Malioboro Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, a soft-spoken Muslim scholar, Muhammad Fajrul Fallah, tried to explain these puzzling changes to me....
Par Da Lek hadn’t seen any of this violence, but nonetheless there were strange rumblings in the village. Over the two days prior to 12 June 2012, men had been shuttled on buses to downtown Sittwe. Ko Myat would watch them go in wave after wave. They were goaded onto the buses and away, he said, by the village administrator, the chief authority there. For those two days, he had stood at the entrance to the village, where the road rises up on a bank above the busy marketplace. Buses would come and go; the men who stood there waiting empty handed would be given weapons – sticks and machetes – before climbing aboard.
The ceiling fans whirred a slow rhythm. Mould crept into the corners of the whitewashed walls; the wide windows looked out onto the barren prison yard. Nyo Maung was marched up to a low, wooden dock flanked by two long tables. His feet scraping across the broken floor tiles echoed angrily through the colonial hall. Before the Burma Socialist Programme Party emblem sat three court martial judges – two majors and a colonel – neat and robotic in their crisp green uniforms, with pomaded hair, wire-rimmed glasses and gold stars on their shoulders. Nyo Maung knew obedience had raised them in the ranks to where they could sentence any soldier to death.
Myanmar has been very much in the news throughout 2017. Conflicting and contradictory narratives vie for authority, and the result is a good deal of confusion about an already poorly understood country. Lucas Stewart has been working for years in Myanmar with the British Council and with Burmese writers and translators. Through examining the work both of established authors and of little-heard writers from the country’s ethnic regions, the aim was to reveal some of the country’s complexities of culture and identity. This resulted in an anthology of stories, many written in scripts that, until recently, were outlawed. The voices presented are authentic and universally human. We spoke to him about the project that produced Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds.
To get a taste of what's in ALR34, start with our selection of free-to-view articles on the ALR34 contents page. A good place to begin is From the Editors.
Much of this issue puts a spotlight on Myanmar (Burma), and we include an interview with Lucas Stewart, joint editor with Alfred Birnbaum of Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds, from which we include four stories. We also feature two stories from Korean rising star Kim Ae-ran, whose writing is the focus for our forthcoming essay competition in partnership with the Literature Translation Institiute of Korea. Finally, sample some of the issue's poetry with John Mateer and Ellen Zhang, and there's more in Preview.
Subscribers can read the whole issue here on the website, through our online reader or by downloading eBooks from their accounts.
This piece is derived from Jeongshik Min’s paper 'A Visual Collective Biography of the Former Korean Comfort Women'. The collective biography in poetic form is inspired by ‘memory-work’ that moves towards a collective history. The Wednesday Demonstrations have been a central influence; Min’s visit to the House of Sharing, the group conversations, and the paintings by the former sexual slaves have provided material for the articulation of ‘the stories without voice’. The original text has been reworked by Shirley Lee with the author’s permission.
'for my wife, who waits every day
Nothing remains in your name, nothing
but to wait for me, together with the dust of our home'
Liu Xiaobo is dead. That’s a fact. And that his death was at least indirectly caused by the cruelty and immorality of the Chinese government is obvious to anyone who has access to information about Liu and his imprisonment.
Read Liu's poem to his wife, Liu Xia: You Wait For Me With Dust.
To get a taste of what's in ALR33, start with the selection of free-to-view articles on our ALR33 contents page. A good place to begin is From the Editors.
Much of this issue celebrates the work of translators, and we include some of the entries and finalists from our collaboration with English PEN. One of these is Shion Miura's The Handymen of Mahoro, translated by Asuka Minamoto. Sample some of the issue's poetry with Tishani Doshi and Norman Erikson Pasaribu, and enjoy our interview with Margrét Helgadóttir, editor of Asian Monsters, from which we include two stories.
Subscribers can read the whole issue here on the website, through our online reader or by downloading eBooks from their accounts.
Review by Kathleen Hwang
IN THE AFTERMATH of the Second World War and the end of Japan’s occupation of Malaysia, Teoh Yun Ling is desperately seeking her own peace. She harbours a deep anger towards the Japanese, who interned her for three years in a labour camp where she lost her youth, her innocence, her sister – and two fingers. She is angry also with herself, for having survived when her sister did not. Her maimed hand is a reminder of deeper scars.
Review by Isabelle Cheung
Luck seldom rears its head in Alexander Khan’s memoir, Orphan of Islam. Khan was raised to be ashamed of his mixed-race heritage, was wilfully deprived of his mother’s love and cruelly abused in an effort to make him into a good Muslim.
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SET IN MALAYSIA, When All the Lights Are Stripped Away is the engaging story of a young man’s coming of age, his search for his sense of identity and his acceptance of how the past pulls on the present. Divided between his loyalty to the memory of his mother, a painter, and his animosity towards his father, a powerful, influential businessman, Anil drops out of high school and flees his small hometown to Kuala Lumpur soon after his mother’s sudden, accidental death.
Review by James E. Hoare
IN A VERY BRIEF TIME, Escape from Camp 14 has become a famous book. This is not surprising. It is well-written and easy to read even if its subject is horrific. Since it began life in the form of a newspaper article, it has been serialized on BBC radio and extracted around the world in a variety of other newspapers. It tells the story of a man now called Shin Dong-hyuk, who lives in Seoul after having spent some time in the United States. But he was formerly Shin In Geum, born in one of the toughest North Korean labour camps where there was no faith, hope or charity, just sheer mind-boggling brutality. Today he has found a sort of peace, recounting his story to audiences who listen to his tale with horror...
Review by Clarissa Sebag Montefiore
Despite all the news coverage, precious little is known about what life is like for those in the so-called ‘Hermit Kingdom’. American author Brandon W. Jones seeks to address the deficiency with his debut All Woman and Springtime. Essentially a coming-of-age tale, the novel follows two young North Korean women as they make the transition from their teenage years to adulthood in the most brutal of circumstances...
'They say they feed you first because the well-fed ghost is prettier.’ So observes Hyun Woo, the lead character in this novel, as he watches his fellow prisoners being led to the execution chamber. He is serving an eighteen-year sentence for his involvement in the Kwangju Uprising... Review by Lucia Sehui Kim
Review by Michael Hoffman
ELLEN THOMAS is a seasoned, award-winning British journalist embedded with British troops in Afghanistan; Jalil had been her ‘turp’ (interpreter). They were friends. He had saved her life, yet she refused to give him a loan that would have allowed him to study engineering in the United States. After he is killed she is remorseful and feels indirectly responsible, and takes it upon herself to find out how he died.
Review by Fionulla McHugh
WITH A Michael Ondaatje book, the images persist long after you’ve forgotten the intricacies of the story: a woman dying within a cave of swimmers in a desert (The English Patient); a young nun falling into the arms of a man building a bridge (In the Skin of a Lion); a truck driver crucified to the tarmac on a Sri Lankan road (Anil’s Ghost). His latest work, The Cat’s Table, includes another image that’s both spectacular and matter-of-fact: a ship passing through the Suez Canal, the demarcation line between Asia and Europe and the journey within a journey at the heart – and the exact mid-point – of this tale of transition.
Liu Xiaobo's 'You Wait for Me With Dust' - Chinese original:
和灰尘一起等我 - 给终日等待的妻
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Today, the 28th December 2010, is Liu Xiaobo's birthday and there seems to be no prospect either of his release or of an end to the indefinite house arrest of his wife, Liu Xia, who remains isolated without charge.
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'He asked me to put the hairs
in a small yellow box. It was plastic,
with a catch at the front that clicked
when closed.'
'I know exactly how you feel. I see you at the brekkie table, reading a newspaper. You – a decent citizen, a reasonably informed voter, patriotic in your own quiet way. I know exactly, because I’m the same. Whether it was Julia Gillard and Labor who got your goat, or Tony Abbott and the Liberals who make you spew, the urge is universal: you sit at breakfast and poke your finger once, twice, thrice into the newsprint or touch screen. You turn, tongue-tied, head shaking, managing only to say to your spouse: What a dickhead!'
Somewhere in the sunshine of the everlasting dawn
from my airborne stance
I feel absorbed across the broad pavement.
Or am I dissolved in a voice
that can’t sever from its verse.
How oft do mates bang on at length about
how well they’re hung, they grab their crotch then slash
the air, then chuck an arm at will around
a chum while necking Stella till they’re lashed.
‘You’re going to be busy next year,’ declared old lady Soneda. It was a fine evening in late December. They were in the hospital lounge, which was very quiet. Outside the windows, a threadbare lawn and withered trees with naked branches could be seen.
Now I’m going to tell you a story about women and love, said Tunick. Or rather, it’s a story about the dark side of love: fickleness, jealousy, and fury. You shall witness many evil deeds committed in the name of love. It’s a story that unleashes your most perverted fantasies, in which you torture your ex-lovers out of guilt and feigned anger, ruin them with rumours, kill them with a borrowed knife, wipe out every single relative of your love-rivals, fornicate with your neighbour’s wife and daughter, kill your best pal and screw his voluptuous wife.
Margrét Helgadóttir is editor of the Fox Spirit Book of Monsters, a seven-volume series with titles published annually from 2014–2020. The first three volumes cover European, African and Asian monsters. In 2016, African Monsters was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards.
In this issue of the Asia Literary Review we feature two stories from Asian Monsters: Grass Cradle, Glass Lullaby by Isabel Yap and Blood Like Water by Eve Shi.
The bird cried with a wildness, yellow beak parted in gasps
as his feathers peeled away with the pitch,
skin underneath raw and burned.
We left him there, panting under an overturned laundry basket,
too ashamed and weak to end it...
Hiuen Tsang spent seventeen years travelling from China to India and back in the seventh century CE, at the time of the Tang dynasty emperor Taizong. His adventures inspired Wu Ch’en-en’s sixteenth century novel, Journey to the West, which refers to India as ‘Buddha’s pure land’.
We're in free fall
from life to life
From the gallows on Tower Hill
to a palace in Old Cathay...
For a taste of what's in ALR32, read our selection of free-to-view articles. A good place to start is From the Editors.
Then read Jessica Faleiro's Arrival: Notes from a Migrant Goan. Sample some of the issue's poetry with Amlanjyoti Goswami and Anuradha Gupta and enjoy the extraordinary photography of Coventry's nonagenarian Masterji, who also provided our front and back covers. Non-subscribers can read a couple of free-to-view paragraphs for each piece in the issue, followed by a link to our subscription page. There's a range of fiction and non-fiction, and we include an exclusive interview with Madeleine Thien, winner of Canada's Scotiabank Giller and Governor General's prizes, and shortlisted for the 2016 Booker. More....
The woodpecker’s catechism, doctrinal, drilling the house,
is the discordance between thinking and thought,
is the candelabra of your hand, there, effacing thought,
is the clock’s cluck-clucking: What is the chief end of man?
My son he crossed the black water
ate beef and woke each morning
to the razor-cut breath of cold
I heard him calling me in my sleep...
I should have kept it –
the tongue I grew up with,
the language of my mother
and her mother before her...
When light strikes the point of reflection
everything falls into place:
you and I are no more
there is only one space...
Where the river bends I’ve made my home
Sauntering quotidian on the towpath
From Hammersmith Bridge, clad in green and gold
To Barnes Bridge, steel-grey-painted;
The colour of the water beneath.
The sound of dogs barking woke him up. Ahn reached out reflexively for his phone, which he had placed at the head of his bed. It felt familiar and solid in his hand, but his ears were still mistaking his ringtone for the barking of dogs.
Coincidentally, he had been dreaming that he was being chased by a pack of black dogs and had just ducked into a phone booth with broken glass. The barking dogs were slavering at the mouth, sharp teeth bared. Ahn clutched the phone with trembling hands as his knees nearly buckled from a sharp urge to urinate.
Hello? Is s-somebody there? Ahn sputtered, when the signal finally went through. The dogs vanished as suddenly as if they’d been swallowed by a thick fog. Not just the dogs, but the streetlights, the vandalised phone booth, and the handset he had been clutching, leaving Ahn standing alone in a deserted field.
Maganbhai Patel is better known as Masterji, a portrait photographer of the Coventry South-Asian community. In November 2016 his first solo exhibition opened to massive acclaim, with features on local, national and international television, online and in local and national newspapers. In March 2017 his black and white photographs will be a centrepiece of the Mumbai Focus International Photography Festival. This from a man celebrating his ninety-fourth year. In this article, we reflect on the art of the Master through his portrayal of the lives of South-Asian migrants to Coventry during the second half of the twentieth century.
‘Please get ready. Number 36.’
We move into position, me behind Wee Kiong. He bends low, legs apart. The sensors on us light up and begin clicking. Those embedded in us – the permanent ones – start ticking, the wiggle of worm-crawl under our skins. It is not an unpleasant sensation; in fact, it is mildly sensual.
I prepare myself, using the lube. The air-con in the room dries it up quickly. I apply a dollop on Wee Kiong. His muscles clench, then relax.
Life sometimes has a way of chewing you up and spitting you out. After eleven years in Singapore and Hong Kong, I made the curious decision to move back to Australia. I left my home in a seething metropolis for a new home in a sleepy seaside village, and my world shrank to the size of a postage stamp.
Pearl Beach is a pristine strip of coast nestled beside thick bushland, an hour and a half’s drive north of Sydney. There is nothing here but a café, a general store, an upmarket restaurant with limited opening hours and a community hall offering seniors’ yoga, seniors’ stretching and seniors’ Pilates, depending on the day. The neighbouring beach towns offer little in the way of attractions, but each has a shop selling motorised scooters. Then there are the funeral parlours, each with slight variations on the same shopfront display: a vase of white flowers standing on a wooden coffin, set behind a wispy white curtain. I did not come here to die, but in the short time I have been here, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it.
We float and swim, we boat and punt on the storm waters aglow in the weak sunlight. In a freak occurrence, an accident of the El Niño year, warm and cold currents met and mingled, a dance of opposites that birthed the rains in gleaming rivers. If there is a line that separates land from warm turquoise, it blurs, and we fall into our shadows or perhaps our shadows swallow us, the outlines of boat and people, wavy lines of form.
Everyone was talking about the bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade. Yun and her classmates had seen angry commentators dominating the news every day since the event had occurred, a month before, in May 1999.
My mother-in-law, Wang Wei, has a key to our flat. She moved to Beijing when I was very pregnant with Echo, our daughter, but she didn’t move in with us as most Chinese mothers-in-law do. Instead, she rented a flat in the same compound, just a building over, because, she said, living with us would be bu fangbian (inconvenient). The unspoken reason was our cultural differences, but I didn’t care about the why; I just exhaled, gratefully.
That didn’t stop her from entering our flat first thing in the morning and not leaving until after dinner every day. You see, in Chinese culture, a child’s home must be fully accessible to his or her parents. But for twelve hours a day? There were no boundaries...
I can hear crickets, luminous crickets singing inside my veins, singing and telling stories of sun-baked earth and marshlands and bogs, crickets merrily taking those stories into my pumping heart...
Nobody tells you how vulnerable you’re about to become. The plane lands and your emotions start to heighten once you pass through immigration. Even if someone is waiting for you in Arrivals, you know somewhere deep within that your whole world is about to change. You just have no idea how, or how much.
more...
Listen. Here’s a story from the era of General Chun Doo-hwan – one of the more preposterous dictators to have ruled our land.
Thirty-odd years have passed since these events transpired. Yet as the fate of our protagonist-hero demonstrably shows, sometimes it makes no difference at all that whole decades have gone by. Today he’s still a wanted man, just as he was then...
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There were three things Gimme Lao did not know about himself.
The first occurred at his point of birth. The second happened way before he was born. And the third repeated itself many times over his life. Strictly speaking, the third was not about him. It was about the pivotal impact he had on other people, which he never found out about.
Take, for example, Yik Fan. Gimme Lao and Yik Fan went to the same primary school. Being two years apart, they were not in the same class, nor did they end up in the same extracurricular sports team. As far as he was concerned, Gimme Lao never knew Yik Fan existed.
Yik Fan, on the other hand, would never forget Gimme Lao. More...
'I’m more interested in the North Korean people as individuals, frankly, and the identities we impose on them are the deeper concerns of How I Became a North Korean. Non-fiction would have required many betrayals or revelations that people might regret later, and though I’m aware that the memoir is a huge market, I’m far more interested in protecting the identities of real people.'
When Nixon met Mao, it was a bit like when Harry met Sally – the beginning of a long relationship that would prove to be fraught with tension and arguments, but also involved cooperation, mutually beneficial trades and cultural, artistic and personal interaction. It was also the beginning of a challenge to US supremacy as the world’s superpower, because China’s subsequent economic rise proved so startling and fast, much faster than the world expected.
For an idea of what's in this issue, click here to read our free-to-view articles and From the Editors. Then scroll down to the contents list below, where we feature an extract from Sebastian Sim's Let's Give It Up for Gimme Lao! There's a sample of ALR31's poetry in John Thieme's mischievous Chinese Checkers. We also offer two terrific interviews, where Xu Xi searches for Gordon Ashberry, her missing protagonist, while Krys Lee tells us about her new novel, set in the borderlands of North Korea and China.
In Hong Kong, an art installation is taken down when the artists explain what it really means...
While I picked up the morning newspaper outside the door with no clothes on,
I came across the man living next door; he was a red radish bitten by me.
Sorry, I am having breakfast!
For ages on the sea news couldn’t reach
the deaf boats seeking the sound of water sent from a faraway land.
The eyes of a school of fish that pass through a deep abyss
are frozen stiff...
This is not a story about Li Xiaolong, also known as Bruce Lee. And I'm not saying that my uncle is Bruce Lee. My uncle was simply one of the countless ordinary people who admired Bruce Lee. At that time, we were all fans of Li Xiaolong. Was there ever a boy who hadn't hit himself on the back of the head while having a go with those nunchucks? We wanted to have a fist as fast and powerful as his, and back muscles as broad as a straw floor-mat...
The Spring 2016 issue of the Asia Literary Review is a celebration of contemporary Korean literature from the country's most exciting young writers.
This issue also includes an essay on Korean Literature by Deborah Smith, translator of Han Kang's The Vegetarian, winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Click here for launch events and PHOTOS.
In April 2016, we released our 'K-Lit' issue, dedicated to an emerging generation of writers focused on modern Korean life as faced by its younger people. What they have to say about the society's contradictions - its optimism and despair, nostalgia and innovation, stark reality and unbridled fantasies - sheds a spotlight on the country from an angle rarely seen by non-Koreans.
Click the link for launch events and more...
The cockpit dashboard blinks
A thousand eyes
Each dial a finger
Spinning him somewhere
Far beyond the star-rimmed sky...
The Asia Literary Review talks to Justin Hill, author of the companion novel to the new film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny - due for release in February 2016.
Follow the link to buy books by some of the writers featured in the ALR.
Books bought through this page will support us in bringing excellent writing from and about Asia to a wider readership.
Viktor and his friends are in thrall to Beijing’s new hedonism. They symbolise the possibilities open to Chinese youth who choose to experiment. Viktor is the lead singer in a Beijing-based band called Bedstars and is immersed in China’s underground rock scene. Describing themselves as ‘doomsday rock’, Bedstars’ influences range from the Rolling Stones through the Libertines.
more...
The tiger lay sprawled upon a stone girdle that ran around the pipal tree’s trunk. He was a picture of elegance in his fashionably striped suit. His furry little member peeping out from between his thighs and the soft curve of his belly gave him just that little touch of helplessness, so attractive in all things male...
The floor is cold with the coming winter.
I pull on white socks
and sit down before the blackout window
to think about our separation closing in.
For a taste of what's in the Autumn 2015 issue of the Asia Literary Review, enter the world of China's 'doomsday rock' with Jemimah Steinfeld and the Bedstars, join RK Biswas and the Tiger Under Pipal Tree, and discover the poetry of Jee Leong Koh and Saleem Peeradina.
There's much more on Issue 29 in our Editorial.
To read the rest of this issue, take out an eBook or joint Print+eBook subscription - and we'll deliver four issues right to your door anywhere in the world.
Single copies are also available on our website in print and eBook editions, and coming soon to bookshops in Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing and elsewhere. Read on...
In Eden, the fig leaf failed its mission – the fruit hung
Immodestly from the tree, tender as a testicle...
Li Mingqin would lean on his balcony railing and smoke a cigarette before going back to bed with a good book. He had lately been skimming through The Story of the Stone, and, although he wasn’t terribly interested in the teenagers or their whims, he was fascinated by the descriptions of the house interiors, and had practically off by heart the passage where Lin Daiyu arrives at the Rong-Guo Mansion...
After a painting, ‘Yogini in the forest’, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
'It had something to do with the air...'
Jiangnan canals are frozen
Men walking home are murdered
for a pint of rice. Door to door, orphans
beg for gruel. Sly, greasy cooks invite them
in to welcoming kitchens.
more...
This time she burst into his world with her half-page profile in a Sunday newspaper in a section dedicated to emerging artists...
'Contrary to what they believed, I was never allergic to skin. Or sunrays. I wasn’t a cadre.'
Manan Karki's prescient poem, written well before the recent earthquakes in Nepal, depicts a broken land: 'A nation cursed by the Sati'.
Glenn Diaz's 'Stress Management' takes us behind the scenes in a Philippines call centre for a grimly humorous account of a soul-sapping industry.
We've had an exciting collaboration with Australia's Griffith Review in putting together a joint issue. For a taste of our selection, scroll down to enter the world of Stress Management in call centres with Glenn Diaz, find out why Prodita Sabarini won't Let Bygones be Bygones after the Indonesian purges of 1965, and discover the poetry of Manan Karki and ko ko thett.
Read all about Issue 28 in From the Editors, and there's more here.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall...
Dr Ren had never seen the real thing before. He’d read about it, of course. He’d seen pictures. He knew the penalties, like everyone else...
Harem whore. Worthy Lady. Concubine.
Then Consort. Then the Noble Consort Yi.
more...
My absent baby is cutting the sunshine coming into the room
Going toward the sunshine which cuts earthworms discharging blood...
It is raining, but people’s faces are flowing, hugging separate things as they enter the used-book store. They unhappily place their book in a vacant space and then one worn out book spreads open in secret.
more...
If an ocean between us lay,
I would drink it in a single draught,
Bring the boats all to dock
read more...
Then the cool north wind blew. Meili stood on the top of Victoria Peak and looked across the bay to the distant mountains behind Kowloon. She imagined she could smell Hunan again...
Xue Xinran’s work is remarkable, not least for the way it has retrieved the lost narratives of Chinese people – and particularly women – in the twentieth century. Her latest book, Buy Me the Sky, relates the true stories of children born under China’s one-child policy which over three generations has had a profound effect on the nation. The book reveals the policy’s unintended price to China - broken continuities of parenthood, family, community and tradition.
Xinran, herself a product of the policy and mother of an only child, recently spoke to the ALR. She talked of her passion to articulate the experience of her people and in so doing, she revealed both the steely determination of a committed journalist and a mother’s indomitable spirit.
For a taste of what's in this issue, scroll down to visit Jeremy Tiang's Beijing Hospital, explore The Sinking City with Bill Tarrant and sample the poetry of Imtiaz Dharker and Song Lin.
Find out more about Issue 27 in From the Editors.
To read the rest, take out an eBook or joint Print+eBook subscription - and we'll deliver four issues right to your door almost anywhere in the world.
Single copies are now available both in print and as an eBook. More...
When Doctor’s words confound Sophia’s patchy Mandarin, she says, Pardon, but he just grows unhelpfully louder. Finally she begs, Wait, wait, and dials a number. As the phone rings, she imagines the aunt’s ungainly progress through the apartment’s camphor-scented air, catching her knee on the rosewood armchair, swearing in pungent bursts.
A click and muffled thud as the aunt pulls at the cord and demands, breathlessly, Yes?
ON THE FIRST DAY of spring Keita Hosokawa fell in love with a bird. If anyone had told him a week before that that would happen, he wouldn’t have believed it. He was fed up with birds. Specifically crows. More...
By the time I was in my thirties, I was fated to die, said the murderer, now in his forties. He spoke again. Murder is my profession. My side-job is to pose as a policeman, then extort from people. I murder only if it pleases me.
‘There are more poets than stray dogs in this country,’ Thitsar Ni, a leader of a Burmese poetic pack was heard to lament at a Yangon teashop. Burma/Myanmar, with its diverse literary and oral traditions, should not surprise you if it brags the highest density on earth of poets per square mile. After all, the Burmese are going through a collective adjustment disorder, known as transition. Besides, you don’t even need pen or paper to be a poet. You just need to utter your poem in the manner of poets of oral traditions and spoken word...
‘I won’t blame you if you look for a lover,’ I said tentatively.
‘You won’t?’ A barely detectable smile came to Uncle Renfeng’s face, exposing the little gap between the two central upper teeth, his eyes searching for and avoiding mine all at the same time.
read more...
For three years, Tulene has had the bathroom to himself. Still, he keeps a milk crate stocked with the essentials just inside his front door, for easy access. If Old Chow were to find Tulene’s toothpaste beside the bathroom sink, or his towel hung on the bent nail poking from the back of the door, he might demand more rent...
A mountain-blue, hot September day. I reached Abbotabad from Lahore two days ago. Today I am embarking on a journey from Abbotabad to Oghi. I say embarking because it feels like I’m going on a pilgrimage. The village I am going to is close to the Taliban belt, in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan, renamed as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2010.
more...
Tea splashed from the cup half-raised to her lips, smudging the newsprint. Sheena couldn’t believe it but there it was, a half-page matrimonial advertisement with the title: Indian Billionaire Needs A Wife: Are you the ONE I am looking for?
more...
We're delighted to announce that the new issue of the Asia Literary Review is out and annual subscriptions are now available - and there's a taste of what's on offer right here. Tap or click the cover for more.
For an eBook subscription to the Asia Literary Review, please visit our eShop - and for a single copy of Issue 26 or other recent issues, click or tap here: UK / US.
Prefer paperback? Click here. Print subscriptions will be available shortly. More.....
The strongest man on the job fell and hurt his back, and ended up in hospital for weeks, abandoning a lovely young wife to temptation and scandal. Things were never the same for Hafiz, the innocent bystander – not at the godown, not anywhere else.
The sun burns through the mist, vultures circling and then settling in the dead trees. The golden roofs of a monastery rise like a mirage against the snow-flocked Dharamsala mountains...
more...
‘Jap,’ he spits, long after the surprise attack.
The armless man, his sleeve pinned back, perhaps
a veteran, surprises back
at Robert Wholey’s fish market in Pittsburgh – Jap:
A word like these to wrap in wax as she, my mother,
in her worried accent cries, ‘Reeve head, preeze.’
Justin Hill translates the poems of Yu Xuanji (c 844–870), perhaps the most distinctive of the female Tang Poets – writing feminist poetry in the 9th century. She also combined all the ways a woman could have some degree of independence – concubine, courtesan and priestess – into one short life (by all accounts she died, or was executed, at the age of 26). More.....
Amanda Lee Koe presents the subtle and moving story of Arlene and Nelly, from Ministry of Moral Panic, winner of the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize (English Fiction).
'It wasn’t always this good, and Arlene never lets herself forget that. This is why she hasn’t gone to the doctor’s yet, despite the burgeoning lump in between the end of her armpit and the beginning of her breast, on her left side.'
from Tanglin Halt
Amanda Lee Koe’s Ministry of Moral Panic is the winner in the English Fiction section of the Singapore Literature Prize 2014. This interview was published just before the awards were announced. Amanda is Fiction editor of Esquire (Singapore) and is the editor of creative non-fiction web platform POSKOD.SG. The winners of the Singapore Literature Prize were announced on 4 November 2014.
2 November 2014
The Asia Literary Review spoke to Claire Tham, whose novel The Inlet, published by local Singaporean publishing house Ethos Books, is a contender in this year’s Fiction (English) category. Claire is no stranger to literary prizes. At the age of seventeen she won two prizes in the 1984 National Short Story Writing Competition. ‘Cash-based awards are an obvious attraction!’ says Claire. With the prize money earned when she was seventeen, she was able to buy her first pair of contact lenses.
As a mainlander in Hong Kong, I constantly feel the prejudice and ill will against us but also understand the helplessness that underlies these feelings. For many years, I have lived with the awkwardness of being stuck between two worlds; but tonight I picked a side. Tonight I stand by you, because you are doing what I never dared to dream.
'I have to say to you that what you have now – your courage and hope, solidarity and discipline – are so precious. You have no idea how people in the dark corners of the world, me included, covet it. It is an honour and a blessing. Hold on to it, for your own hopes, and for ours too.'
more...
Here are some of the articles we've published about it.
Shamed by your denial,
we wait:
Glory and repentance,
we seek both.
we need both.
read more...
The University of Leiden, the Netherlands' 'Bastion of Liberty', hosts a conference led by elite North Korean exiles speaking publicly for the first time about what really happens behind the scenes in what outsiders have hitherto perceived as an inscrutable dictatorship.
Inscrutable? Not any more. Jang Jin-sung, author of Dear Leader and once poet laureate of the dead dictator Kim Jong Il, joins fellow experts in the small community of high-level North Korean exiles to expose the inner workings of the DPRK regime.
Three poems by Tammy Ho, originally published in the Summer 2006 issue of the Asia Literary Review.
At the ALR we welcome comments from our readers. Click on the image to get started. Blog posts have individual comment threads, and other pieces open to comments have a link at the bottom of the article.
According to RocketNews24, peach producers in the PRC are struggling to make sales. A controversial marketing ploy prompted China-based poet Reid Mitchell to pen this paean to peaches.
Increased tensions between the Chinese and Vietnamese governments make waves in the South China Sea for Dang Van Nhan and thousands of local fishermen.
'In this land of 7,701 beauty contests, Filipinos are assured that women occupy the highest places of honour and that the best Filipino man is a woman.'
Maria Carmen Sarmiento
Justin Hill remembers the Tiananmen massacre and reflects on how memories of it have been suppressed on the mainland.
Jane Camens, a founder of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and the inspiration behind the Asia Pacific Writers' and Translators' Association, introduces the third in an influential series of annual conferences. This year's event in Singapore follows two hugely successful events in Bangkok.
One of Asia’s best platforms for promoting new work and spring-boarding to other international events is the annual gathering of the ever-expanding Asia Pacific Writers' and Translators' Association (AP Writers).
Miss Noy Khouvangsa was Lao’s first cyborgweaver.
She was made of silk. Her body tissues, corneas, and hair were constructed from the exudate of the remarkably industrious silk worm...
The air turned chilly as the sun sighed into the nearby hills. It picked up the smells of dust, mixed with metallic and acrid dung flavours.
Ms Phaeng watched, holding her breath as the last sliver of red fell out of sight. Casting a quick mantra to the spirits of nature, she swallowed a glass of lao lao to start the evening...
The moment he returned from the office, Ananth quarrelled with his wife.
Sheela had reserved a table for eight o’clock that evening and it was already seven. Ananth could tell that she had been pacing the corridor....
CHINA! The name of the world’s Number One State strikes me as properly onomatopoeic, especially perhaps in English. China! It rings grand, and big, and sonorous, like a great copper gong, but to my mind there is something mysteriously discordant to it, as though the alloy is defective. Of course this interpretation is ridiculously subjective ...
First day and Third Uncle says,
‘Raining liao, last year not like that.’
Spring, in his mind
is a static, sweltering brightness.
more...
Seeing the strange belts
like little mouth masks
hung on bamboo poles
I often wondered ...
The trapped their caves escape.
The honest poor rejoice in the streets of Baghdad,
and birds despite the cage
have words enough to speak...
Visit this page to read some of our archived book reviews.
In Issue 25, we highlighted the plight of Paco Larrañaga, still in prison after a deeply flawed trial and sentence in the Philippines. Grammy-nominated musician Bob Regan is on video to explain why he was moved to write a song dedicated to Paco and to the need for his release. There's also a petition for Paco, and the Give Up Tomorrow website offers ways to help the Philippines recover from the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan. Re-read Luis Francia's moving article for the ALR on Give Up Tomorrow, the award-winning documentary about Paco Larrañaga.
When a bomb lands in Talwar Khan's Afghan village and fails to explode, his rival attempts to deal with it.
This poem was inspired by the death of Jyoti Singh Pandey who was gang-raped in a bus in Delhi on 16 December 2012. She later died in a hospital in Singapore, where she was sent for treatment by the Indian authorities. The Indian media called the 23 year-old woman Nirvaya, the fearless one. It was her father, Badrinath Singh, who revealed her name. He wanted the world to know who she was.
Simon Peter gives his own account of knife crime.
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Not a subscriber? You can read lots of free-to-view articles on the website and a selection of pieces from each issue in our Preview Reader. If you'd like to subscribe, visit our Subscribe page or go to the Shop and Subscribe menus on the red main menu bar.
Subscribers can read the whole of this issue through our online reader.
Not a subscriber? You can read lots of free-to-view articles on the website and a selection of pieces from each issue in our Preview Reader. If you'd like to subscribe, visit our Subscribe page or go to the Shop and Subscribe menus on the red main menu bar.
Subscribers can read the whole of this issue through our online reader.
Not a subscriber? You can read lots of free-to-view articles on the website and a selection of pieces from each issue in our Preview Reader. If you'd like to subscribe, visit our Subscribe page or go to the Shop and Subscribe menus on the red main menu bar.
Subscribers can read the whole of this issue through our online reader.
Not a subscriber? You can read lots of free-to-view articles on the website and a selection of pieces from each issue in our Preview Reader. If you'd like to subscribe, visit our Subscribe page or go to the Shop and Subscribe menus on the red main menu bar.
Subscribers can read the whole of this issue through our online reader.
Not a subscriber? You can read lots of free-to-view articles on the website and a selection of pieces from each issue in our Preview Reader. If you'd like to subscribe, visit our Subscribe page or go to the Shop and Subscribe menus on the red main menu bar.
Subscribers can read the whole of this issue through our online reader.
Not a subscriber? You can read lots of free-to-view articles on the website and a selection of pieces from each issue in our Preview Reader. If you'd like to subscribe, visit our Subscribe page or go to the Shop and Subscribe menus on the red main menu bar.
Subscribers can read the whole of this issue through our online reader.
Not a subscriber? You can read lots of free-to-view articles on the website and a selection of pieces from each issue in our Preview Reader. If you'd like to subscribe, visit our Subscribe page or go to the Shop and Subscribe menus on the red main menu bar.
For work that hasn't yet been transferred from our previous website, you'll soon be able to click on more than one of the links below:
- All archived poetry - more than 200 poems
- Seamus Heaney
- Selected contemporary Chinese poetry
Meanwhile, there's lots of recently published poetry here.
A little earlier that afternoon, Commander Zhang’s car had driven up to the guest house, turned around a couple of times and headed, not for the west wing, but for the east one. It stopped, and the Commander came bustling round to open the rear door and obsequiously bow someone out...
The first child of a second wife will always have issues. And when a girl too beautiful and too smart spends the formative years of her life sleeping on a cardboard mat by the family Cadillac, habitually deprived of Lady’s Choice sandwich spread on her morning pan de sal and amidst many a drama of hapless parenting, expect that something in her head will be seriously messed up...
My friend Gore Vidal, who died this summer, was a writer whose acerbic wit, perhaps exemplified in his autobiography, Palimpsest, will be celebrated for a very long time.
Hall of Fame, a series of portraits commissioned by filmmaker and contemporary artist Zhang Bingjian, acknowledges that corruption is often the path to fame and fortune.
The subtitle of this book is ‘Hong Jun Investigates’, and it’s one of four in a series starring the same protagonist, a lawyer who has returned to Beijing after spending several years studying and working in America...
Cheap labour is a key component of competitiveness for companies striving to make a profit in today’s global market...
From 14 February 1989 onwards, Salman Rushdie did not receive his post directly. Instead, every letter or invitation went to his agency, where it was screened and tested for explosives before a member of his protection team would pick it up and take it to him...
Some days I just can’t seem to focus. It’s hard to concentrate on what’s going on around me, on what I’m doing.
It’s been getting worse lately. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed from the moment I wake up in the morning, as though something bad is going to happen.
I can’t breathe right; my hands and feet are cold. My head hurts...
After I left my teaching job I faded out of my marriage, which really existed in name only, and sold the flat in Xindian. I distanced myself from the theatre circle where I’d made a sort of name for myself and began refusing invitations to drink and play mahjong with the lecherous pigs I had come to call my friends. Once packed, my meagre belongings were barely enough to fill a small van, and so I passed through the gloomy Xinhai tunnel to set up shop as a private investigator in Wulong Street, a godforsaken place of unmarked graves...
The sky in North Korea always leads to China
dark during the day, bright plutonium yellow at night...
Men and women in the snowy fields
picking cabbage with your naked hands...
1. Let us govern those who undertake the telling of stories.
2. Censorship is good governance. Self-censorship is an attribute of the highest civilization.
3. If an actor speaks of God, he will be chastised. He will be refused an encore. If he repeats the speech, he will have his licence revoked.
4. Let us govern those who undertake praise of the next world, since what they say is neither true nor useful to us.
5. Our best recourse is to be warlike.
(Click the title for more...)
I once offered to cut off my arm in exchange for a tour of an illegal noodle-making operation.
I reached this peak of desperation in 2007 while on assignment in the southern port of Xiamen, where I was trying to capture the clandestine nature of China’s countless unregulated manufacturers...
Allow me to introduce you to Madhukar Sarpotdar. On 11 January 1993, when Bombay was reeling after weeks of fatal rioting, an army detachment apprehended Sarpotdar in one of the worst hit areas of the city. He was in a jeep, along with nine other men including his son and someone called Anil Parab. Also in the jeep were several swords, sticks and two guns, one of them unlicensed: at the time, even carrying the licensed one in a riot-hit area was a violation of the law.
The army turned Sarpotdar and his pals over to the police...
In Roppongi we have saints. Self-proclaimed street prophets – insanity (pardon me, I mean fervour) was how my people survived the mission-aries. I tolerate all claims of divine sight, lest I dig the moat I drown in. What I see: blinding lights, plainclothes police. People don’t come here for God. People come here to find people. Look, don’t touch. Touch, don’t hold. Hold, but put it back when you’re done, please. Roppongi ni irassha...
The first drops that hit the corrugated iron roof sounded like fat, lazy splashes, but soon they were pelting down as furious as bullets. Phra Sumon sat cross-legged on the floor of the little hut with eyes closed – a picture of monastic stillness that contrasted with the watery onslaught. But his mind was far from still, and the beads of sweat forming on his forehead slid down the contours of his angular features and dropped from his chin onto the orange robe that cloaked his brown, athletic body. In the insistent beat of the downpour he kept hearing a mantra that dragged him back, yet again, into the wreckage of his past...
The tale that follows is neither a personal confession nor an apology – for which it could very easily be mistaken – but something much more substantial. It is an explanation or, to be more precise, an elucidation of the excesses, committed, within my knowledge, by men of power.
How much corruption is there in China today? This is a difficult question to answer properly. But we can start with the two methods for assessing the state of corruption in a country or region: the objective method and the subjective method.
Corruption is widely acknowledged as a serious, and endemic issue in China. Yet only occasionally – when big cases such as that of former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, or news of the extraordinary wealth accumulated by the family of Premier Wen Jiabao, come to light – is the public provided with a glimpse into the rarefied world of corrupt, elite officials.
Jeet Thayil is a performance poet, songwriter and guitarist. He has published four collections of poetry and edited The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008).
THE HERO OF THIS STORY is the eponymous thief, who recounts his life as a pickpocket in Tokyo, and how he moved from petty crime to involvement in a murder. He never tells us his name, and it is pronounced to him only once.
Shin Kyung-sook is one of South Korea’s most popular writers of contemporary fiction. She has published seven novels and numerous short stories, and has won several literary prizes in her own country. She broke new ground for Korean writers in March 2012 when the English translation of her novel, Please Look after Mother, won the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize. The book had already sold close to two million copies in Korean.
Interview by Kathleen Huang.
'Wherever people are gathered
there are gunshots to be heard....'
Read The Executioner and other poems by Jang Jin-sung, translated by Shirley Lee.
Interview by Fionulla McHugh
He spent two years in the early 1980s living in Egypt, a period he describes in his non-fiction book, In an Antique Land. While there, he read Gabriel García Márquez and Boswell’s Life of Johnson; he would say later that his time in Egypt, ‘was absolutely the fundamentals of my education as a writer’.
He can remember the minute his life changed with news of his first novel’s acceptance.
‘What happened?’
‘A telegram!’ he says, and suddenly giggles with pleasure into his napkin. ‘I’ll never forget that day; I had clouds under my feet.
more...
'You cultivate the habit of the open mind. You must be aware that anything could fly in the window at any time. So you keep the window open rather than allow an idea to brain itself on the glass.'
– David Mitchell on writing
Poems from Modern Chinese Poetry: Insistent Voices, by Zheng Danyi.
Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Shu Ting, Yang Lian, Gu Cheng, Zhai Yongmin, Bai Hua, Zhang Zhao, Chen Dongdong, Zheng Danyi.
Read more...
IT WAS A TIME of deep disaffection and despair. Those who had experienced the agony of the Cultural Revolution were filled with uncertainty about the future of China.
Interview by Ben Naparstek
A PROLIFIC writer of history, reportage and cultural commentary on Asia and Europe, Ian Buruma is renowned for his quiet force and levelheaded analysis in a time of clamorous sound-bite punditry...
HAILED AS A SATIRICAL PORTRAIT of greed, corruption, ambition and violence in modern India, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, awarded the 2008 Man Booker Prize for fiction, breaks new ground in the literature of the subcontinent and in its approach to giving voice to the voiceless.
Published in the summer of 2008, Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma has been hailed as one of the most important novels of recent years. Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of The Independent, spoke for many when he called it ‘truly extraordinary’ and a book that ‘in the future will be seen as a defining work of fiction of the early 21st century’.
Such praise is unlikely to be widespread in Ma’s homeland of China where Beijing Coma has not received an official publication. As an epic account of the origins, events and aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989, this is hardly surprising. While bootleg copies of the book are sure to make their way across the borders, an official release in the Mainland is unlikely in the near future.
'When people use the phrase "magic realism", all they hear is magic – they don’t hear realism. I don’t particularly like the phrase because I think it only applies to those South American writers of that particular time. Magic realism, fabulism, surrealism – they are all essentially the same thing, just in different places at different times. It is quite simply breaking the rules of naturalism.' - Salman Rushdie