Essays

Double Dissidents

Xiaoyu Lu

The cognitive dissonance of overseas Chinese students – Xiaoyu Lu

“Why were you defending an authoritarian regime?”

Tina, a friend from Comparative Politics class, asked me this as we walked out of the seminar room. We had began our graduate course at Oxford three years ago, and both carried on with doctoral research in Politics. Despite the occasional hostilities between our home countries (China and the US), we quickly became close friends and suspended the ideological differences between us. Still, her question left me half shocked and half puzzled. During the past two hours, we had been debating furiously about the “doomed future of democratization” and the “crisis of liberal democracy.” As usual, I was critical of mainstream political thought, especially any definition of democracy that delimits itself to a few institutional yardsticks, along with a tone of moral proselytism that renders democracy as a dividing battle between us and them.

Reviews

Left in the Wake of a Mother’s Deportation

Rui Zhong

Rui Zhong reviews The Leavers by Lisa Ko

There are two types of ethnic Chinese in America: those who do not have to worry about deportation, and those whose lives can be upended by it.

These two groups often pass by each other without realizing their differences. They may find themselves standing across from one another at the checkout line. A scientist born in the United States might share notes with a lab-mate overstaying his student visa. A woman comfortably vacationing with her visa-stamped passport can speak Mandarin with a manicurist who is one annoyed colleague’s phone call away from ICE custody. Every deportation leaves behind friends, colleagues and lovers irreversibly damaged by the removal.

Essays

From History to Fiction

Dung Kai-cheung

Dung Kai-cheung on inventing Hong Kong stories

History is not fiction, nor fiction history. The two are not the same thing, or else we do not need two different words, two different notions. It is dangerous to confuse them. Yet, history and fiction are closely related.

In a narrow sense, where facts are verifiable, we have to defend history from fiction. The Holocaust and the Nanking Massacre are two of the most obvious cases. But in a broader sense, things don’t seem so clear-cut. Historians do their best to verify the facts, but nearly always facts do not exist by themselves. What we have instead are documentation and testimonies, which are seldom without inadequacies or biases. Then comes the necessary step of interpretation, the area where historians excel at contending with one another, individually or as representatives of political or ideological perspectives. In principle, the line between facts, documentation and interpretation may still be drawn to a certain extent, but in fact the gradation is often blurred or the division has become hardly discernible. As the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm has repeatedly argued, national histories are invariably inventions of traditions. The result is that we simply take the interpretation or inventions as the facts themselves. It is in this sense that we may call history fiction.

Chinese Corner

Riddle Me This

Nick Stember

Chinese word puzzles - Nick Stember

Can you read this?

🐎🐎🐯🐯

This is an example of “See the Picture, Guess the Phrase” (kàn tú cāi chéngyǔ 看图猜成语), a kind of Pictionary for language nerds. If we translate the emoji into Mandarin we get “horse horse tiger tiger”… or mǎmǎhūhū 马马虎虎, which means “careless” or “so-so,” depending on the context.

My own path to this wonderful corner of the Chinese internet started with a simple, seemingly unrelated question: Are there Chinese crossword puzzles? How would that even work?

Reviews

The Devil’s In the Details

Lisa Brackmann

Lisa Brackmann reviews City of Devils by Paul French

For the first third of Paul French’s latest nonfiction book set in historical China, I felt guilty for enjoying it as much as I did. There are few places more romanticized in the Western imagination than pre-WWII Shanghai, and City Of Devils plays into those tropes: exotic, corrupt Shanghai, “home to hopeful souls from several dozen nations joined together by one simple guiding ethos: money and the getting of it.” It is a portrait of a city filled with gamblers, soldiers-of-fortune and opium dens. Its occupants include “White Russian women of dubious occupation,” “dead-eyed Eurasian Macanese” and “hard-working Filipinas and Formosans” plying their trade in the flops and whorehouses of Blood Alley.

City Of Devils focuses on two Westerners who have come to Shanghai to prosper and to escape: dapper Joe Farren, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Europe whose nightclubs and performing troupes earned him the nickname “the Ziegfeld of Shanghai” (after the Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld), and American fugitive Jack Riley, the “Slots King” making his fortune with his fists, his smarts, and a pair of loaded dice.