Posted: November 25th, 2017 | No Comments »
Issue #34 of the Asia Literary Review is now available…
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.
Posted: November 24th, 2017 | No Comments »
Destination Chungking
Han Suyin
Camphor Press | November 2017 (February 1942) | 342 pages
click here to buy in paperback or e-format
Destination Chungking is the fictionalized autobiography of best-selling writer Han Suyin. It tells the love story of a young Chinese couple during the turmoil of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Childhood friends Han Suyin, a medical student, and Tang Pao, an officer in the Kuomintang Army, cross paths in England and fall in love. Returning to China to take part in the resistance, they marry in October 1938 in the city of Hankow on the eve of its capture by Japanese forces. Separated and reunited during an epic retreat across China to the wartime capital of Chungking (Chongqing) far up the Yangtze River, the couple will find their love and patriotism tested.
Written and published as the war still raged – and Chungking continued to be heavily bombed – the book is also a story of the idealistic couple’s love for China, a homage to the good humor and persistence of the Chinese people.
Destination Chungking is a stunning debut from a young woman writing in her third language. Han Suyin (1916-2012), born Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou, was a Chinese-Flemish novelist and historian who explored the contact and conflict between East and West in her fiction, a reflection of her own mixed heritage. Her most famous work is A Many-Splendoured Thing, a bestseller when it was released in 1952 (though some critics such as Kirkus Reviews considered it inferior to Destination Chungking), and which was later made into the film Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1956).
Posted: November 23rd, 2017 | No Comments »
Book Launch
Thailand: Shifting Ground Between the US and a Rising China – Ben Zawacki (Zed Books, Asian Arguments series)
Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand on 29 November 2017 at 7pm.
The book was published last month by Zed Books and the University of Chicago Press (https://www.zedbooks.net/shop/book/thailand/), and has been endorsed by the New York Times, Harvard University, Time, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Asia Times.
I wrote the book between late 2013 and early 2017, part of which as a Visiting Fellow in the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. Previously, having lived in Southeast Asia for fifteen years, I held positions or consultancies with The Elders, Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, and the UN Refugee Agency.
The book incorporates interviews with more than 90 persons, including four Thai prime ministers and seven foreign ministers, as well as other senior US and Thai policy-makers, politicians, ambassadors, and military officers. In August 2015 I was granted a rare and extensive interview abroad with deposed premier Thaksin Shinawatra. Various journalists, academics, and long-time “friends of Thailand†rounded out the research, for a book described by the New York Times as a “well-informed analysis of a critical momentâ€.
Additional details regarding the launch can be found on the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand’s website (https://www.fccthai.com/items/2281.html). The club is located on the penthouse floor of the Maneeya Building, which is connected to the BTS Skytrain’s Chitlom station. As this event is open to the public, it is recommended that a seat be booked in advance by calling the club at +66 2 652 0580.
Posted: November 22nd, 2017 | No Comments »
If you’ve waited all year and not yet been on the Official Midnight in Peking Walking Tour – now’s your chance!
The last tour of 2017 takes place this coming Saturday evening.
Eighty years after Pamela Werner’s body was found mutilated at the foot of Beijing’s Fox Tower, Bespoke Beijing and Penguin Books have teamed up to retell the events of that fateful night with the help of historian Lars Ulrik Thom.
Retracing the steps of Pamela’s distraught father, the tour winds through the dark alleys and quiet corners of Beijing’s former Legation quarter and notorious ‘Badlands’ to reveal a side of the city few know existed.
Based on the international bestselling book by Paul French, Midnight in Peking doesn’t just solve the grisly crime decades after it was abandoned by British and Chinese authorities, but paints an evocative portrait of 1930s Peking – a city on edge as it awaited Japanese invasion.
So for fans of crime fiction, history buffs or just the intellectually curious, the Official Midnight in Peking Walking Tour is a must. Whether you buy it as an early Christmas gift for a friend, or just yourself, get your skates on! There are only 25 spots available.
To purchase tickets for this Saturday, November 25th, click here
for more information email – info@bespoke-beijing.com
Posted: November 21st, 2017 | No Comments »
Those with an interest in the history of the Chinese community in London, or the UK as a whole, may be interested to note that Anne Witchard’s chapter on Thomas Burke, the author of Limehouse Nights (from the collection London Fictions) is now online to read for free – click here…
Posted: November 19th, 2017 | No Comments »
Mason Warner was, I believe a Chicago ad man of the 1920s and 1930s known for having successfully marketed Kool-Aid, who took a trip to China in 1935. This was his conclusion…
Posted: November 18th, 2017 | No Comments »
The following appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser in November 1934…I am not quite sure if I understand what it is – an advert, a comic piece, a letter?? I’m guessing it’s some of ad for Hawaii’s Primo Beer brand though the rest isn’t really clear to me at all!!
Posted: November 17th, 2017 | No Comments »
James Stourton’s British Embassies: Their Diplomatic and Architectural History (Frances Lincoln) sadly doesn’t cover any of Britain’s China embassy or consulate buildings. Of course the former embassy building in the Legation Quarter was wonderful but is now strictly off limits being home to the thugs of the Public Security Bureau. Nobody would bother to include the current British Embassy on Guang Hua Road in any coffee table book except perhaps one that showcased awful architecture, soul destroying interiors and cheap M&S suits galore.
The former British Consulate in Shanghai on the Bund is now an adjunct of the incorrect (for Shanghai) American art-deco styled Peninsula Hotel – older readers will remember stocking up on essentials at the Friendship Store which occupied part of the premises in the 1980s. The British Consulate did move to the Metropole Hotel briefly in 1937. Again those of an older vintage will recall the charming surroundings of the British Consulate when it moved into the former French Concession and a villa on Yong Foo Road, and even had its own London taxi cab back in the days when the FCO still had a bit of individualism and style (yea, i know, hard to imagine under the reign of the Whitehall penny-pinchers and the calamities of the idiot Johnson!). Those of us with memories of that building were happy to turn up to the opening of a new club in the summer of 2004 – a restaurant and bar restored the site (quite well initially) as the Yong Foo Elite (which was unkindly, but amusingly quickly, dubbed the “Fuck You Elite”). It was initially a private members club, but i think any old riff-raff can pitch up nowadays.
Anyway, this book does include some Asian locations – Kabul, Bangkok, Rangoon (very lovely), Singapore and New Delhi.
