Unwelcome

Unwelcome by Quincy Carroll My rating: 5 of 5 stars In ‘Unwelcome’ we follow Cole Chen through his awkward misadventures in California and Changsha, China. The twenty-three-year-old has come back from his second stint in China and is crashing on his brother’s couch. Our introduction to Cole is through the eyes of his more successful Unwelcome

Conquerors

Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire by Roger Crowley My rating: 4 of 5 stars As Roger Crowley explains in “Conquerors”, in the early 16th century Portugal, a poor country on the periphery of Europe, came to control trade in the Indian Ocean thanks to bravery, cruelty, navigation skills and cannons. They fought Conquerors

White Faced Lies

White Faced Lies by Eric Flanagan My rating: 3 of 5 stars An interesting project. ‘White Faced Lies’ follows the journey of two ‘face jobbers’ in China. Face jobbers are foreigners who get paid to stand around and just look – well foreign – ideally American, white, tall, good-looking, and with blond hair. It is White Faced Lies

Buenos Aires Triad Chapter 1

THE SPOTTER A phalanx of drivers waited at the front of the arrivals hall. Standing with the others, Lucas had a sign for a certain Jorge Martínez: a passenger who would never arrive. Lucas was there to make an important decision, not to drive somebody into town. He thought it would be agony to choose. Buenos Aires Triad Chapter 1

Argentina Sketches: Story of the Eye

Lying in bed my eye felt like it was going to explode, finally, after hours, aqueous fluid and pus squirted out relieving the pressure. The pain subsided, but only for fifteen minutes. So began a rewarding experience of the public health sector in Argentina, one winter morning in 2010. After consulting my friend (who I Argentina Sketches: Story of the Eye

Chiang Kai-shek on the Forbidden City

Originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel as Forbidden Portrait. In 2016, at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, I saw a black and white photo that didn’t compute at first. The photo featured a portrait of the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-Shek, hung above the Tiananmen gate of the Forbidden City Chiang Kai-shek on the Forbidden City

Argentina Sketches: The Albino Thief

She checked in wearing dark glasses. It didn’t seem weird as she had platinum blond hair and pale skin. I put her in a six-bed dorm. There was only one other guest in there, a Russian woman of twenty-five. Dorms were officially mixed but in practice, we generally kept men and women separate. We hadn’t Argentina Sketches: The Albino Thief

Eyes Wide Shut: Malaparte in China

Originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel as When Malaparte Met Mao. A former fascist sees only the good in Mao’s China. In 1956 Italian novelist Curzio Malaparte received an invitation to travel to Beijing for a commemoration of the death of writer Lu Xun. Malaparte is most famous for his Eyes Wide Shut: Malaparte in China