Follow the Signs
Published in Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel
My mother is one of the most worldly travelers I know. Mention any city or country around the world, and she’s either been there or is game for going. “What about Panama City?” I asked. She agreed immediately. (Read more)
“Chinese Movie Magazines: From Charlie Chan to Chairman Mao, 1921-1951” by Paul Fonoroff
Published in Asian Review of Books
Film can tell a lot about a place and time, but not many film industries have gone through as much change as China’s. (Read more)
Panic and Desperation in Hong Kong
Published in the Fall 2018 Issue of Mystery Readers Journal
I spent my formative years in Hong Kong, moving there as a wide-eyed, nineteen-year-old, six years after Britain and China signed the Joint Declaration to eventually end 150 years of colonization. It was also one year after Tiananmen. (Read more)
REVIEW: On the New Translation of Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions
Published in Cha Journal on November 7, 2018
In the fall of 1995, Eileen Chang’s landlord let himself into her apartment. She hadn’t answered the phone in several days, and he was worried about her. When he opened her door, he found her, dead of cardiac arrest, alone and anonymous in her Los Angeles apartment. (Read more)
Production line China fiction: two new novels
Published in Asian Review of Books on July 8, 2018
For most people in the West, the relationship with China is one based on products—clothes, shoes, mobile phones—or, should the rumbling trade war materialize, the lack of them. But the people who toil away making these products are hardly ever brought into focus. (Read more)
Pioneering Women
Published in LARB China Channel on September 17, 2018
Sometime during my early years of learning Mandarin, I heard the name Michelle Vosper. If memory serves me right, my Mandarin tutor back in 1990 mentioned a friend or acquaintance in Hong Kong, where I was headed at the end of that summer for a study abroad year. I never met Ms. Vosper that year or the other four I lived in Hong Kong, but it seemed serendipitous when I was introduced to her book late last year in Chicago by the English translators of Hong Kong playwright Candace Chong’s Wild Boar. (Read more)
Struggles of a Hongkonger’s Chinese ‘second wife’ in US realistically portrayed in debut novel
Published in South China Morning Post on October 2, 2018
Story of Shenzhen factory worker made pregnant by a Hong Kong businessman, her time as a birth tourist in the US and her attempt to make a life there is compelling and believable (Read more)
Sounding the Alarm in Hong Kong
Published in the LARB China Channel on January 8, 2018
“The Hong Kong playwright Candace Chong Mui-Ngam worked with David Henry Hwang to translate Hwang’s award-winning play Chinglish, which premiered in Chicago in 2011. Chinglish, a story of cross-cultural American-Chinese relations in a business and personal context, went on to take Broadway by storm. Chong herself is one of Hong Kong’s most renowned playwrights and recently collaborated again with Hwang – for another Chicago premier – but this time on a play Chong wrote. Wild Boar debuted in Cantonese in Hong Kong back in 2012 and has recently been performed in English by Chicago’s Silk Road Rising theater company, with Joanna C. Lee and Ken Smith translating the play into English and Hwang adapting it for an American audience.” (Read more)
A Leap of Faith: Joe Piscatella’s Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower
Published in the December 2017 issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
“When Occupy movements sprung up around the world, it wasn’t extraordinary when Hong Kong started one of its own. The protest culture in the territory had been slowly brewing since Tiananmen and more so after the handover. What stood out was that Hong Kong’s Occupy movement lasted so long—almost three months—and that it was sustained by a sixteen-year-old.” (Read more)
A Throwback to Hong Kong’s Golden Age: Chi Fat Chan’s Weeds on Fire
Published in the December 2017 issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
“Hong Kong is not known as a sports powerhouse, no matter the game. And if you ask people in Hong Kong about the popularity of baseball, most would say it’s mainly confined to expat enclaves. And they probably wouldn’t remember when a group of delinquent youths from Shatin became the first local team to win a championship back in 1984. Director and screenwriter Chan Chi-fat brings this story alive in his 2016 movie, Weeds on Fire, a low-budget film that went on to be nominated for eight Hong Kong Film Awards, eventually winning best new performer (Tony Wu Tsz-tung) and original film song.” (Read more)
Hong Kong Noir
Published in the LARB China Blog on December 28, 2016
“When I lived in Hong Kong in the 1990s, my only interaction with the police occurred when I’d return from Shenzhen by foot. Once on the Hong Kong side of the Lo Wu Bridge, I always breathed a sigh of relief when I saw their crisp navy uniforms. The sight represented stability, order, and safety, things that were in short supply in Shenzhen and the parts of Hubei that I often visited as well on my forays to the mainland. Life in those places had a Wild West, free-for-all feel to them. There, as opposed to in rule-honoring Hong Kong, the trend often seemed to be that those with guanxi (personal connections) could work the system, while others were left to their own devices.” (Read more)
From Sichuan to Shanghai: A Q&A with Marketplace Correspondent and Street of Eternal Happiness Author Rob Schmitz
Published in the LARB China Blog on May 18, 2016
“Rob Schmitz has witnessed enormous changes in China since he first lived in rural Sichuan twenty years ago. For the last six years, he has been based in Shanghai serving as a correspondent for Marketplace, a radio program produced by American Public Media that enjoys 12 million listeners each week, receiving multiple awards for his stellar reporting. His first book, Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road, was just released yesterday. Set along the shady street where he and his family live in Shanghai’s former French Concession, his book is one of the best I’ve read about China’s sweeping social and economic transformations.” (Read more)
The New Life in English of an Old Eileen Chang Novel
Published in the LARB China Blog on March 16, 2016
“Eileen Chang’s fiction mirrored her life. Shanghai comes alive in her pages, from the political turmoil in the 1930s and 40s to the nightlife and fashion of the times. But Chang – a.k.a. Zhang Ailing – is best known for her love stories beset by family interference, betrayal, and melancholy reunions. Born and raised in Shanghai, Chang was unusual in that she wrote in both English and Chinese, often translating her own work. She also translated other authors’ books, including Han Bangqing’s massive tome, The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai. This book and another classic, Dream of the Red Chamber, shaped her writing. But her life experiences in love and disappointment influenced her work more than anything.” (Read more)
Raising my half-Chinese son after divorce
Published in China Daily on September 25, 2015
“When I moved to Hong Kong at the age of twenty-three, I gravitated toward Mainland communities there, namely the one at the university where I attended graduate school. I had studied Mandarin at that point for about five years. I started teaching English to a Mainland graduate student named “Cai” that first semester. Although I didn’t know this custom at the time, people in China back in the mid-1990s dated with the intention of marrying.” (Read more)
At Home in the World – Interview with Leza Lowitz
Published in the June 2015 issue of Asian Jewish Life
“Asian Jewish Life: You have written over a dozen books on a wide range of topics, from young adult fiction to memoir to yoga poetry to travel guides, multicultural mothering anthologies, and many more. Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? And how did you get your start in publishing?” (Read more)
Victor Sassoon’s Shanghai in Life and Literature
Published in the June 2015 issue of Asian Jewish Life
“Two new books published this year are set in Shanghai during World War II and touch upon the Jewish community there. In Tea on the Great Wall: An American Girl in War-Torn China (Earnshaw Books, 2015), Patricia Luce Chapman writes of her childhood in China. Born Patricia Potter, she lived in Shanghai with her parents, older brother Johnny, and a handful of servants.” (Read more)
How I Got My Literary Agent: Susan Blumberg-Kason
Published in Writer’s Digest on October 31, 2014
“Six years ago I started querying agents for Good Chinese Wife, a memoir about my tumultuous first marriage to a man from central China. A writer friend advised me to complete fifty polished pages of my memoir and a nonfiction book proposal before querying agents. That was all I would need, he said, because that’s how agents sold nonfiction.” (Read more)
True Story: My Memoir Pissed Off A Male Book Reviewer
Published in The Frisky on July 12, 2014
“When I started writing my memoir, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair With China Gone Wrong, I began networking with authors who wrote books set in Asia. I imagined developing solid friendships with a group of supportive authors. There’s a Chinese saying, huxiang bangzhu. It means ‘mutually helping one another.’ That’s what I pictured.” (Read more)