Asian Review of Books

In 1800, the Shogun’s chief minister wrote the following about the city of Edo:"Someone said that if Edo did not have frequent fires, then people would be more showy and flash. In the capital or in Osaka they do everything with lavish elegance: people hang up paintings in their homes or put out arrangements of flowers. But in Edo, even in the affluent areas, everything is restrained. People only display a single flower [in a bamboo tube or a simple pot]. The wealthy have fine chess sets, but the box will have paper fixed under the lid to double up as the board. Edo’s sense of conciseness comes from continual fires."According to Professor Timon Screech, author of Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo (Reaktion Books, 2020), the city is the source of much of what we consider to be Japanese culture: sushi, Mt Fuji, cherry blossoms. Tokyo Before Tokyo is a rich illustrated volume that presents the vibrant visual history of Edo. The book is presented as a series of vignettes, dealing with key landmarks and districts from the old city, from the Shogun’s castle to the famous red-light Yoshiwara district.In this interview, Professor Screech and I talk about the different vignettes that make up Tokyo Before Tokyo, and the role that Edo played in old Japan. We also investigate his decision to focus on landmarks and districts, and whether any of old Edo can be seen in today’s Tokyo.Professor Timon Screech is Professor of the History of Art at SOAS University of London. He is the author of at least a dozen books on the visual culture of the Edo period, including perhaps his best-known work Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820 (University of Hawaii Press, 1999). In addition to Tokyo Before Tokyo, his other most recent book is The Shogun's Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625 (Oxford University Press, 2020). In 2019, Professor Screech was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Tokyo Before Tokyo. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

From its more mainstream, business-focused and business-friendly “Lean In” variants, to more radical, critical and intersectional understandings of feminism, the past decade has seen a flourishing of discussion from those proposing and critiquing different schools of thought for the way we think about gender in society.Dr. Eugenia Cheng’s addition to this conversation is x+y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender (Basic Books, 2020). She applies insights gained from her mathematical background to propose a new way to talk about gender and to propose an alternative: the terms “ingressive” and “congressive” behavior.In this interview, Dr. Cheng and I talk about what we gain from bringing a mathematical understanding to questions of social relations and structures. We talk about how she rethinks “gender”, and the new terms she proposes in her book. We end with a short discussion of whether these insights are applicable to conversations about other demographic and social identifiers.Dr. Eugenia Cheng is a mathematician and concert pianist. She is Scientist In Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a PhD in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Alongside her research in Category Theory and undergraduate teaching her aim is to rid the world of “math-phobia”. She was an early pioneer of math on YouTube and her videos have been viewed over 15 million times to date. Her other books are How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics (Basic Books: 2016), which was featured on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics (Basic Books: 2017) which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize in 2017 and The Art of Logic in an Illogical World (Basic Books: 2018)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of x+y. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

"The Volga! There is a mystery, a charm in all mighty rivers, which has ever made us gaze upon them with an interest beyond that inspired by other great and glorious sights; but to look on the largest of the European rivers gave a thrill of joy surpassing all former pleasure of the kind."This quote by Robery Bremner in 1830 opens Professor Janet M. Hartley’s latest history, The Volga: A History (Yale University Press, 2021). The book uses the Volga to frame the history of Russia: from its pre-Russian state through the growing Russian Empire, and ending with the Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation. The book presents the Volga as both a divider between “East and West”, but also a meeting ground of different cultures and ideas — and how that drove efforts to create the Russian identity.In this interview, Janet and I talk about the Volga, and its central place in Russian history. We talk about how the Volga connects to trade, cultural exchange and the formation of the Russian state and identity. Finally, we explore what we gain by looking at a country’s history through a geographical feature like a river.Janet Hartley is Professor Emeritus of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she worked for over 30 years. She is the author of seven books on Russian history including Siberia: A History of the People (Yale University Press: 2014). She has also edited or co-edited 7 books and written many articles on Russian history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Volga. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

An old farmer, trying to build a plane in his village. A young man that gambles everything on the roaring stock market. A community transformed by a magical fruit that evokes vivid memories. A Chinese woman unable to understand her American partner. People stuck in a train station, waiting for a train that never comes.These stories, among others, make up Land of Big Numbers (Mariner Books: 2021), the debut story collection by Te-Ping Chen. Chen’s fiction spans a wide array of styles and narratives, from vignettes that feel like they could have been plucked from the newspapers, through surreal allegories for Chinese society, to character examinations of cross-cultural relationships.In this interview, Te-Ping and I talk about the different stories in “Land of Big Numbers”, and her choice of styles, narratives and themes. We talk about how these stories are based on her time in China, as well as the differences between writing for fiction and writing for journalism.Te-Ping Chen is a fiction writer and journalist. She is a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Philadelphia who was previously based in Beijing and Hong Kong. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Granta and Tin House. She can be followed on Twitter at @tepingchen.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Land of Big Numbers. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Journey to the West, and especially the character of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, is beloved by readers across China, East Asia, and beyond. The story and its characters have been written and rewritten in books, comics, graphic novels, movies, television shows, and video games. In many ways, Journey to the West and Son Wukong have become archetypes: stories and characters that people refer to and recognise, without ever looking at the original source material.But for those interested in reading the original novel, we now have a new translation of Journey to the West (Penguin Classics: 2021) from Professor Julia Lovell. This new translation takes the original 1592 novel by Wu Cheng’en and presents its adventures, humor, satire and spiritual insights for a modern audience.In this interview, Julia and I talk about Journey to the West: its story, its characters, and its history, before and after the publication of the 1592 novel. We talk about what motivated this new translation. Finally, we end by discussing how Journey to the West and the Monkey King have had an impact on popular culture far beyond China, through Japan, Southeast Asia and the West.Julia Lovell is a Professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research primarily focuses on the relationship between culture and modern Chinese nation-building, and on the wide-ranging impacts of modern China’s encounters with the world beyond its borders. She is the author of several well-received histories of China, including The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Pan Macmillan: 2011), and Maoism: A Global History (Bodley Head: 2019). She has also translated several works of Chinese literature, including The Real Story of Ah-Q and Lust, Caution.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Monkey King. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida once described his idea of absolute hospitality as follows:Absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only the foreigner, but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering in a pact) or even their names. Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community, and the Meaning of Generosity (Knopf, 2020) by Priya Basil uses food — the act of cooking, eating, and hosting — as a vehicle to discuss the meaning of generosity. Drawing on her family’s and her own experiences in India, Kenya, and Germany, along with many other cultural references, she discusses what it means to be a host and guest, on the personal and the social-political level.Some of the themes of Be My Guest are discussed in her 2019 essay for The Observer, “Being a good host is about more than just the food,” and in a video for the Humbodlt Forum, “Locked in and Out”.In this interview, Priya and I talk about the meaning of generosity, and how it relates to food. We talk about whether there are differences in how people both offer and receive generosity, and how these differences connect to our politics.Priya Basil was born in London to a family with Indian roots, and grew up in Kenya, moving to Berlin in 2002. She has published two novels and a novella, as well as numerous essays for various publications, including The Guardian. Her fiction has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Basil is also the cofounder of Authors for Peace, a political platform for writers and artists, established in 2010. She is also a co-founder and co-editor of the literary-political journal Rhinozeros – Europe in Transition.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Be My Guest. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 1935, the writer Baburao Patel writes the following about Bombay’s film industry:“In India, with financing conditions still precarious, the professional film distributor thrives. . . . He comes with a fortune made in share and cotton gambling, advances money to the producer at a killing rate of interest plus a big slice of royalty and recovers his investment by blackmailing the exhibitors into giving heavy and uneconomic minimum guarantees. His only aim in life is to multiply his rupee and in prosecuting this aim he does not worry about the future of the industry or about the existence of the producer or exhibitor.”It’s a hectic time for India’s film industry, as it is for films everywhere, as the silent era becomes the talking era. Debashree Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press: 2020) examines this key period of India’s film industry, from finance and casting to screenwriting and production, and brings into view the experiences of the marginalised film workers and forgotten film studios that made up this early period of industry.In this interview, Debashree and I talk about the transition from silent to talking movies in Bombay, along with the historical context and working conditions for those in the city’s historical film industry.Those interested in learning more about the film industry in 1930s Bombay can visit the Wildcat of Bombay Instagram account at @wildcatofbombay (recommended by Debashree!)Debashree Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope and has published in journals such as Film History and Feminist Media Histories. In a previous life Debashree worked in Mumbai’s film and TV industries as an assistant director, writer, and cameraperson. More information can be found on Debashree’s website, and she can be followed on Twitter at @Debashree2017.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bombay Hustle. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Around the Chinese New Year period, millions of Chinese migrant workers return home from jobs in China’s major cities to their rural villages to visit their families. China’s urban centers and factory towns rely on migrant workers from provinces like Guizhou: places that are still relatively underdeveloped, despite the massive growth seen on China’s coasts. The fact that, this year, many migrants likely can’t return home due to the COVID-19 pandemic is a reminder of the instability that defines much of their lives.The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World (St. Martin’s Press: 2020) by Dexter Roberts studies the lives of China’s migrant workers, based on Roberts’ twenty years of reporting from the country since it joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001. The book combines big-picture analysis with on-the-ground reporting, using the story of the Mo family to reveal the underlying problems in China’s economic model. The book was named one of the Economist’s Best Books of 2020.In this interview, Dexter and I talk about China’s migrant workers and how their struggles reveal the potential instabilities in China’s growth model. We talk about what a migrant worker’s life is like, and how it may have changed in the past twenty years. We also touch on what’s happened since his book was published, as referenced in recent articles like: “The Discontent of Migrants Looms Over China”, The Wall Street Journal, March 6th, 2020. “Don’t Count on China to Lift the Global Economy”, Foreign Affairs, April 8th, 2020. Dexter Roberts is an award-winning writer and speaker on China, now serving as a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council Asia Security Initiative. He is also a fellow at the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, and an adjunct instructor in political science at the University of Montana. Previously he was China bureau chief and Asia News Editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, based in Beijing for more than two decades.He also publishes a weekly newsletter called Trade War. More details can be found on his personal website.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Myth of Chinese Capitalism. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

At 10:20pm on August 15th, 1969, Ravi Shankar — then, and still, the most famous practitioner of the sitar and Indian classical music — takes the stage at Woodstock. It’s arguably the zenith of Indian music’s popularity in the West, with musicians like the Beatles, the Byrds and Led Zeppelin embracing elements of Indian music. But this was merely the middle-point of Shankar’s artistic development, nor was it a personal highlight in a long and storied career. For many musicians in several different genres, both in and outside of India, Shankar is the most important messenger for the ideas and concepts of Indian music.Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar (Faber & Faber / Hachette: 2020) by Oliver Craske is the first full biography on Shankar’s life, charting Shankar’s musical journey — from accompanying his older brother, the dancer Uday Shankar, on world tours at a young age, through the height of his worldwide acclaim in the late Sixties, to the end of his life as the most respected performer of Indian classical music. More details about Indian Sun can be found on the book’s official website.In this interview, Oliver and I talk about the life of Ravi Shankar, and the many ways his music was important both in and outside of India throughout the Twentieth Century. We talk about the fundamentals of Indian classical music, and whether India’s music plays an important role in the country’s “cultural soft power.”Those interested in experiencing Ravi Shankar’s music for themselves can access this Spotify playlist, curated by Oliver Craske.Oliver Craske is a writer and editor, with a longstanding interest in Indian music. He first met Ravi Shankar in 1994, and worked with Shankar on his autobiography. Craske is also the author of Rock Faces: The World's Top Rock'n'Roll Photographers and Their Greatest Images (RotoVision: 2004), a survey of leading music photographers.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Indian Sun. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

We are just over a year from when global news first reported a new type of pneumonia emerging in the Chinese city of Wuhan. A lockdown of Wuhan on January 23rd, 2020, was the first indication that these stories were more serious than originally thought.All of us know what happened next: COVID-19 spread from China to other countries in Asia, then to Europe, then to North America, then worldwide. To slow the spread, countries frantically imposed travel restrictions on those coming from places affected by COVID-19: a massive shift away from the increasingly open borders seen over the past two decades.One traveller caught up in these new restrictions was Ethan Lou, author of Field Notes From a Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended (Signal, 2020). Ethan arrives in China in early 2020 to visit his family, as the first leg of a trip around the world. On each leg of his journey, he sees how different parts of the world are transformed by the global pandemic. Field Notes From a Pandemic, named among the CBC’s best Canadian non-fiction books of 2020, is one half travelogue, one half commentary, in and about a changed world.In this interview, Ethan and I talk about his journey around the world, and how COVID-19 made a routine trip exceptionally complicated. He shares how he saw the world change in real-time, and which of those changes may end up sticking around.Ethan Lou is a former Reuters reporter and has served as a visiting journalist at the University of British Columbia. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Maclean's, the South China Morning Post, the Walrus, and the Washington Post. His next book is Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West. He can be found on Twitter at @Ethan_Lou, and his work can be found at https://ethanlou.com/.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Field Notes From a Pandemic. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review