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Photo by Yashima Gakutei from the Monkey King Songokū, from the Chinese novel Journey to the West / Wikimedia Commons
While the Monkey King’s on-screen presence in Sinners is…
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
May 22, 2025Photo of Hon Lai Chu by Jeffy Lau In Hon Lai Chu’s newly translated novel Mending Bodies (Two Lines, 2025), intimacy becomes a matter of state policy. The Conjoinment Act, a fict…
April 15, 2025Photo by asilzade58 / moviestillsdb.com We’re all still reeling from the second season’s finale of Severance, but there’s more to unpack than that mic-drop final scene. Viewers’ r…
August 17, 2021Postcard for One City One Book Hong Kong 2020, which featured Xi Xi’s My City The Shanghai-born Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (b. 1937) was the 2019 winner of the Newman Prize…
Illustration by Yang (see footnote) AS THE YEARS GO BY and I get more advanced in age, I find I have become increasingly self-aware. It’s hardly an astonishing revelatio…
Photo: Iva Krakovic Grace Chia is the author of the poetry collections womango, Cordelia, and Mother of All Questions, the short-story collection Every Moving T…
October 11, 2017Left: Dickens reading to his daughters. Right: The Pickwick Papers According to Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, reading aloud was a common practice in the ancient world, the Middle A…
February 21, 2017Bunches and Bits {Karina}, “Sepia,” November 2009 T. S. Eliot, in 1928, famously called Ezra Pound “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.”1 Eliot was referring to Pound’s renditions of fourt…
August 10, 2016In Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, first published in Chinese in 2009 and translated into English in 2011, a novel depicting a dystopian contemporary China, people collectively forget impor…
February 17, 2016Stone faces in Cambodia. Photo by Tammy Ho. In the second installment of “Asian Traumatic Poetics” (to read part 1, click here), I will look at two more poems published in Cha that discuss…
February 10, 2016Chris Beckett, One & Other, by Antony Gormley, Trafalgar Square, London, 2009. In this post and one that will follow next week, I will explore the representation of personal trauma in…
September 16, 2015Drew Wilson, “End of Amnesia,” 2009 1. Kazuo Ishiguro’s long-awaited The Buried Giant (2015), his first novel in ten years, is set in a mythologized fifth-century Britain in which pixies,…
September 4, 2014Hartwig HKD, “Black Icarus,” 2010. Old photographs and their conventions are both familiar and foreign to us, with their alienated and uncanny appeal. They also often seem very formal and stiff com…
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