Having lived in China for almost three decades, I am naturally interested in the expat writing scene. I am a voracious reader of fiction and nonfiction on China, past and present. One constant in this country is change, and that requires keeping up with the latest publications by writers who have lived here and know it well. As an author of three novels, one short story collection, and three essay collections on China myself, I believe I have something of my own to contribute of documentary value, although I tend to hew to gritty, offbeat themes to capture a contemporary China unknown to the West.
Emily Hahn, prolific author and New Yorker correspondent whose sojourns in Shanghai (1935-39), Chungking (1939-40), and Hong Kong (1941-43) coincided with the Japanese invasions of these cities, fictionalizes the life of Canadian Lorraine Murray, turned high-class prostitute in Shanghai after living as a foreign geisha in Japan. Hahn was fascinated by sex workers and hung out with them (Hahn and Murray were roommates), but the novel later morphs into the autobiographical as the beautiful Hahn ingratiates herself with Japanese military officials until she’s forced into a Hong Kong internment camp for several years. Hahn is more reporter than novelist, but her flair for detail and eyewitness authenticity brings Shanghai to life in a way the historical novelist cannot. Especially hilarious is Jill’s hotel scene with the British john who thought he was getting a freebie.
A novel about an enterprising Shanghai streetwalker from the “American literary treasure” and author of the memoir China to Me (The New Yorker).
Meet Miss Jill, a young woman pursuing the oldest profession in prewar Shanghai. Fifteen, blonde, and full of personality, Jill begins her career as a Japanese banker’s mistress. Soon after, she becomes a European prostitute in the house of Annette, and believes that any day now she’ll be married to a nobleman. But none of her adventures prepare Miss Jill for the war and her subsequent internment.
An early feminist and an American journalist who traveled to…
I've lived in Asia for more than 22 years and have extensively traveled around the region, both for work and pleasure, from the Middle East and central Asia to Japan, and Australia, New Zealand, and every country in between. Asia is the perfect setting for a thriller, as a region that’s deeply rooted in traditions, but where modernity and growth are also breathless. There can be political instability at times, and even corruption, unsurpassed wealth and shocking poverty, bankers, and prostitutes. I worked for many years as an investment banker and my experiences inspired me to write my debut thriller, Hard Underwriting, in Hong Kong, and uncover the dark side of Asia’s financial capital.
This is the first book in Valerie Goldsilk’s extensive ‘Reliable man’ series about former Royal Hong Kong Police inspector-turned assassin Bill Jedburgh, who plies his trade across Asia – and beyond, and who is known to those who use his services only as (you would have guessed it), “the reliable man”.
This thriller is set in Pattaya, Thailand, and involves a high-octane chase between Jedburgh, triad devotees, and European mafiosos, amid the exotic scenery of Southeast Asia. Nothing is missing, including bar girls, massage parlours, and sophisticated shoot outs.
Goldsilk herself has lived in Hong Kong for more than 30 years and is married to a former Hong Kong policeman. The story feels authentic (if not politically correct!) and is well written, as are the other books in the series.
A shock diagnosis of a blinding eye disease at the age of 37, coupled with a trip to South Africa to write about the devastating toll of AIDS, drove home the importance of focusing on the Now. This newfound perspective led me to radically change my life and turn my author dream into reality. Eleven years later another shock diagnosis—this time with aggressive breast cancer—led me to the intersections between spirituality and science. That’s where I learned about the proven impact our thoughts and beliefs have on our health and overall life. I now use my transformative journey to empower audiences and help them pursue the lives they want—regardless of the challenges they face.
This book, which is part memoir, part healing, and transformation, is about a woman’s near-death experience after her body was ravaged by stage-four cancer and the miraculous spontaneous healing that followed. It’s an incredible story on its own. But what I found particularly fascinating were Moorjani’s conclusions regarding the thoughts, beliefs, and life experiences that led to her illness, as well as her overall take on how readers can promote healing in their own lives.
In this truly inspirational memoir, Anita Moorjani relates how, after fighting cancer for almost four years, her body began shutting down-overwhelmed by the malignant cells spreading throughout her system. As her organs failed, she entered into an extraordinary near-death experience where she realized her inherent worth . . . and the actual cause of her disease. Upon regaining consciousness, Anita found that her condition had improved so rapidly that she was released from the hospital within weeks-without a trace of cancer in her body!
Within these pages, Anita recounts stories of her childhood in Hong Kong, her challenge to establish…
Raised in a Mexican-Italian family, I grew up traveling across the Arizona-Sonora borderlands to visit my extended family. As a kid, I took for granted movement across boundaries and cultural and racial mixture, but eventually, I came to see it framed my experience and outlook. In researching the Chinese in northern Mexico, I learned that Mexican women and Chinese-Mexican children followed their expelled men, whether by force or choice, and I became enthralled. I had to find out how these families fared after crossing not just borders but oceans. My passion for reading about how the long presence of Asians in the Americas complicates our understanding of history has only deepened.
Taking a transnational frame and drawing on English- and Chinese-language sources by and about Eurasians, this book uses juxtaposition to bring different perspectives to bear on each other. People’s lives, the choices they make amid various external limitations, are at the heart. The book takes a unique structural approach, with a prologue before each main chapter that describes a central story and helps ground and guide the larger narrative. In exploring interracial marriages and the lives of couples and children, the work shows how Eurasians have been producers of knowledge. Through highly diverse sources from the era, the author demonstrates that Eurasians have engaged in self-representation in complex ways and a broad range of voices and experiences comprise the category “Eurasian.”
In the second half of the nineteenth century, global labor migration, trade, and overseas study brought China and the United States into close contact, leading to new cross-cultural encounters that brought mixed-race families into being. Yet the stories of these families remain largely unknown. How did interracial families negotiate their identities within these societies when mixed-race marriage was taboo and "Eurasian" often a derisive term? In Eurasian, Emma Jinhua Teng compares Chinese-Western mixed-race families in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, examining both the range of ideas that shaped the formation of Eurasian identities in these diverse contexts and…
Lawrence Osborne’s books lie somewhere between thrillers, memoirs, psychological investigations, and cross-cultural mysteries. He has been likened to Graham Greene, Paul Bowles, and Ian McEwen, but his stories are truly contemporary in feeling and could be called Expat Noir.
I loved this book for its depiction of the confusions experienced by a veteran British journalist as he attempted to unravel the disappearance of a student protestor amidst the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019-2020. His descriptions of the city, its texture and sensations, and the increasing difficulties arising from powerful political pressures as he follows tangled threads involving his own deep feelings for the missing student are brilliantly interwoven.
I can’t think of any other author treading this terrain so well: the white middle-class expatriate in Asia has become something of a taboo subject, but this book shows how much can be learnt from a still unravelling colonial…
A veteran British journalist living in Hong Kong investigates the disappearance of a student protestor amidst the pro-democracy demonstrations in this unsettling new novel from the acclaimed author of The Forgiven
After twenty years as an ex-pat reporter in Hong Kong, Adrian Gyle has almost nothing to show for it. But now the streets are choked with students demanding democratic freedoms, and the old world is beginning to fall apart.
Adrian's old friend Jimmy Tang, the scion of a wealthy Hong Kong family, has begun a reckless affair with Rebecca, a leading pro-democracy protestor. But when Rebecca disappears and Jimmy…
On the surface, a beautifully written story of a distinguished retired lawyer coping with the death of his wife. But what gripped and moved me were its deeper, ever more relevant themes.
It’s a meditation on the loneliness we surround ourselves with, the compromises we make to keep what relationships we have, the healing nature of the passage of time. I learnt much about the machinery of Empire in its waning days. Yet, somehow, it is not a sad book. A minor miracle of a novel.
First in the Old Filth trilogy. A New York Times Notable Book. “Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters” (The New York Times Book Review).
Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion…
I am East-and-West. Born in British Hong Kong, studied in England, and worked for a US multinational in Beijing, I had a range of experiences that traversed Chinese and western cultures. Sucked into politics in Hong Kong prior to and post-1997, I had a ringside seat to colonial Hong Kong becoming a part of China. I too went from being a British citizen to a Chinese national. Along the way, I got interested in the environment and was appointed a minister in Hong Kong in 2012. I have always read a lot about the world and how things work or don’t work. I hope you like what I have enjoyed!
The author, a Jesuit priest from Hungary, spent years in China before moving to Hong Kong. He was the preeminent scholar on China in the 1970s-80s. Ladany poured over what the CCP said about itself to construct a marvellous “self-portrait” of the CCP, including insights about Hong Kong. His scholarship is awesome and there hasn’t been someone quite like him among scholars on China.
Without an understanding of the Communist Party no one can understand the China in which the Party has dominated the country. This book follows the development of the Communist Party and of Marxism in China from the early years. For the years 1921-49, it relies mainly on revelations in the Communist press of the early 1980s, when Chinese historians of the Party were relatively free to write. In relation to the People's Republic, beginning in 1949, it summarises what was reported by the author in China News Analysis. This is essentially the story of the Chinese Communist Party in its…
A combination of things led me to this topic: My father was forced to leave his home in northern India during partition and was therefore a child refugee. In 2016, I was filming in Ukraine and became hugely interested in what was happening there. I have looked for a way to help ever since then. Discovering Monica Stirling’s novel about refugees from East Europe, I realised that here was an opportunity to help give voice to the refugee experience; to help raise funds for Ukraine, and to help bring back to life an incredible story written by an author who deserves to be rediscovered.
A brutal but beautifully told fiction based on true events, it explores the aftermath of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam – folding into the narrative, such horrific events as the Koh Kra massacre.
The protagonists are 16-year-old Anh, her 13-year-old brother Minh and their 10-year-old brother Thanh. During an ill-fated sea crossing to Hong Kong, they are separated from their parents and siblings. After passing through camps and detention centres, they find themselves in the Britain of the 80s.
What follows is a clear-eyed, often heart-rending look at the immigrant experience. Pin’s writing style is precise and understated – and perhaps the more powerful it. Among the many elements that make the book so beguiling is the addition of Dao, one of the siblings’ lost brothers narrating parts of the story from limbo.
“A deeply humane and genre-defying work of love and uncompromising hope.” ―Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Time Is a Mother
There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies―everything in between is speculation.
After the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Minh, and Thanh journey to Hong Kong with the promise that their parents and younger siblings will soon follow. But when tragedy strikes, the three children are left orphaned, and sixteen-year-old Anh becomes the caretaker for her two younger brothers overnight.
In a previous career, I traveled extensively to many parts of the world. I always found new cultures, old traditions, strange languages, and exotic environments fascinating. Perhaps even more fascinating, were the expats I found who had traded in their home country for an existence far from where they were born and different from how they were reared. In many instances, I’ve attempted to incorporate—in Heinlein’s words—this stranger in a strange land motif in my work. It always seems to heighten my interest. I hope the reader’s as well.
This novel brings readers up close and personal with Hong Kong. Clarke is a young Englishman doing a banking stint in the fabled city. He lives a relatively sedate existence in his corporately antiseptic neighborhood. But one day he decides to get off his beaten path and winds up having his life changed dramatically. He becomes enamored with a shantytown prostitute, embroiled in the geopolitical struggle with Mainland China, and involved in a potential swindle of international proportions. In addition to spinning an interesting tale, Craft is also able to weave in the ticking time bomb of environmental hazards that plague the area without pious preaching and totally within the confines of the story he’s telling.
Rivers had become toxic and the ocean shore is a sea of plastic: there's money to be made. But for Philip Clarke, handsome, clever, and decidedly available, that world seemed a distraction from an altogether different one, where the possibilities of pleasure overwrote the machinery of commerce.
Newly arrived in Hong Kong, his island world lay somewhere between the looming shadow of China, and its strange double downtown, where bankers and brokers breathed the same crowded air as a new breed of political activists. In his mind, he was thankfully immune from both.
This book is just really good historical fiction, a page turner I could not put down.
I learned about an era and culture (early 20th century Hong Kong) I knew almost nothing about, and it was woven so well with the modern-day story. The author did a wonderful job with the plot, the history, the emotions, the family dynamics, and the nuance.
The lives of two women living in Hong Kong more than a century apart are unexpectedly linked by forbidden love and financial scandal.
“Family secrets and personal ambitions, east and west, collide in this compelling, deeply moving novel." -- Weina Dai Randel, award-winning author ofTHE LAST ROSE OF SHANGHAI
“Irresistible and absorbing.” Janie Chang, bestselling author of THE LIBRARY OF LEGENDS
“A riveting tale of clashing cultures, ruthless corruption, and the consequences of corrosive lies.” James R Benn, author of ROAD OF BONES and other Billy Boyle mysteries
In 2016, Patricia Findlay leaves a high-powered career to…
