Rabbit in the Moon

“Has all the ingredients of the best memoirs: an exotic setting, quirky characters, and cultural discord ultimately redeemed by love and acceptance.”—Claire Chao, author of Remembering Shanghai (Writer’s Digest Grand Prize winner)Blame it on Hawaii’s rainbows, sparkling beaches, fruity cocktails, and sensuous breezes. For Heather Diamond, there for a summer course on China, a sea change began when romance bloomed with Fred, an ethnomusicologist from Hong Kong. One night under a full moon, Fred tells Heather the story of Chang’e, the moon goddess. He points out how the shadows form a rabbit pounding an elixir of immortality, but all Heather sees in the moon is a man’s face.Returning to her teaching job in Texas, Heather wonders if the whirlwind affair was a moment of madness. She is, after all, forty-five years old, married, a mother and grandmother. Rabbit in the Moon follows Heather and Fred’s relationship as well as Heather’s challenges with multiple mid-life reinventions, such as moving to Hawaii, entering a Ph.D. program, and living in a dorm with students half her age. When Fred goes on sabbatical, Heather finds herself on the Hong Kong island of Cheung Chau with his large, boisterous family. For an independent, reserved American, adjusting isn’t easy. She wants to fit in, but is culture shocked by the lack of privacy, the language barrier, and the Chinese aesthetic of renao (“hot & noisy”).Life on Cheung Chau is overwhelming but also wondrous. Heather chronicles family celebrations, ancestor rituals, and a rich cycle of festivals like the Hungry Ghosts Festival, Chinese New Year, and the Bun Festival. Her descriptions of daily life and traditions are exquisite, seamlessly combining the insights of an ethnographer with the fascination of a curious newcomer who gradually transitions to part of the family. Ultimately, Heather’s experiences abroad make her realize what she has overlooked with her own family back in the United States, and she sets about making amends.Moving between Hawaii, Hong Kong, and the continental US, Rabbit in the Moon is an honest, finely crafted meditation on intercultural marriage, the importance of family, and finding the courage to follow your dreams.

Biographies & Memoirs

Diamond, Heather

Community & Culture

Camphor Press

A gripping, vital account of one man’s imprisonment by Taiwan’s police state early in the Cold War.In 1954 Tehpen Tsai was arrested by the Kuomintang regime on suspicion of being a Chinese communist agent. After initial weeks-long interrogation near his home he was transferred to a detention facility in Taipei specifically for seditionists and enemy operatives. The evidence against him: two books, one on his shelves at home, and one that another arrestee told police he had seen at Tsai's house.Tsai was not a communist. But in the febrile atmosphere of the early White Terror era in Taiwan that scarcely mattered; the secret police were commonly thought to operate by a rule to “never miss one true criminal, even if a hundred are killed mistakenly.” He had just one thing counting in his favour: he had recently returned from a scholarship in the USA, and the Chiang Kai-shek government at the time was sensitive to American attitudes and pressure.In prison he met genuine communists, anti-government activists, intellectuals, and others like him, unlucky people swept up by a tenuous accusation or a chance encounter. One by one his cellmates disappeared, some to the execution grounds, others to Green Island, the notorious political prison off Taiwan’s east coast. Tsai was more fortunate. Sentenced to a term of “re-education”, he was released in November 1955.Elegy of Sweet Potatoes is a fictionalized version of Tehpen Tsai’s experiences as a political prisoner. Names are changed, dates are fudged, but the narrative here is true to life. A compelling story full of rich description, pathos, and odd moments of humor, it is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the realities of martial law in “Free China”.

Elegy of Sweet Potatoes: Stories of Taiwan’s White Terror

Tsai, Tehpen

Historical

Tokyo: The City at the End of the World

About the Author\nPeter Popham was raised in London and moved to Tokyo to teach English in the late 1970s as the city's boom years got underway. He quickly realised he had a front-row seat for a major cultural eruption, and Tokyo: the City at the End of the World, his first book, captures the exuberant ambition of those years. He joined The Independent in 1990 as a roving foreign correspondent and reported for the paper from more than two dozen countries. His other books include The Lady and the Peacock, on Burma's democratic revolution, which was a best-seller around the world.\nTokyo, 1985. The world's first megacity is at the height of its dynamism. 
Forty years ago, a frenzy of creativity galvanised the Japanese capital. From fashion to movies to electronics, Tokyo was forging the future. Factories run by robots, the world's first high-speed trains, apartment blocks built from shipping containers, love hotels modelled on Bavarian castles... 
In the thick of it, a young British teacher gazed around and asked questions. Why are Tokyoites so phlegmatic about earthquakes? What makes this high-tech city so unmistakably Japanese? And how, despite its size and pace, has Tokyo retained many pockets of perfect calm? 
First published in 1985, Tokyo: the City at the End of the World was quickly recognised, in Time magazine, The New Yorker and elsewhere, as a fascinating portrait of the city that pointed where the world was headed. Forty years on numerous Asian cities have taken up Tokyo's baton, but Peter Popham's depiction of its menace and charm remains unrivalled.

Arts & Photography

Popham, Peter

History & Criticism

Unwelcome

An anti-coming-of-age story that examines themes of escapism and toxic masculinity.\n﻿In the years following his graduation from college, Cole Chen has been back and forth between the U.S. and China, struggling to navigate his transition into adulthood. Estranged from his parents, he returns to Hunan province to work for his friends, while also attempting to write a memoir based on his experiences. During the course of this year abroad, he meets a young woman named Harmony under initially dubious circumstances, whom he dates briefly, before returning to live with his brother in California, where he is forced to confront a dark reality from his past.\nWith shades of Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You and Teju Cole's Open City, the novel attempts to inspect the extent to which one's surroundings (both geographical and cultural) shape conceptions of self-identity, while also raising a more complicated discussion about the ways in which men are taught to view the opposite sex.

Literature & Fiction

Quincy Carroll

United States

Journey to the End of the Empire: On the Road in Eastern Tibet

Review\n"A ground-level account of a journey you'll likely not forget and be glad someone else took. Equally sad and funny visions of China's own Manifest Destiny."-Bill Porter/Red Pine\n"Scott Ezell's Journey to the End of the Empire is about remembering in the deepest sense of recovering the creativity and sense of connection that makes us truly human, amidst worlds of radical disjunction and the authored amnesia of authoritarian regimes."-Ian Baker, Author of The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place\n"In Journey to the End of the Empire, Scott Ezell's reflections on the ecological train wreck currently taking place in western China, and his deeply compassionate portrait of the people exiled to the margins of the Chinese juggernaut, are beautifully articulated with a combination of scientific clarity, poetic beauty, and heart-warming humor."-Henrik Drescher, author of China Days: A Visual Journal from China's Wild West\n"Scott Ezell is a musician of words. He is a highly talented, extremely imagistic writer who packs his lyrical prose with action and sensory-driven details. The people and cultures Ezell writes about are unfamiliar to most, but he brings us into them through an insider perspective that's colorful and full of emotion."-Mark Spitzer, author of Season of the Gar\n"Scott Ezell's work casts a long shadow. Its philosophical components are spot on for our time. Ezell renders his insights with frequent humor, but his language is pure heaven. He orchestrates precision of image with music every time."-Karen Swenson, author of The Landlady in Bangkok, National Poetry Series winner\nOn foot, by rattling truck and local bus, by jeep and motorcycle, American poet and musician Scott Ezell explores the Tibetan borderlands. Plotted with a line drawn on a map in Hong Kong, the journey starts in Dali, in the foothills of the Himalaya in southwestern China. The road extends north a thousand miles through towns and villages along the edge of Tibet, finally arriving at Kekexili, the highest plateau in the world, and crossing the Kunlun Mountains. 
Ezell takes us through landscapes of blond and gold barley fields, alpine meadows ablaze with wildflowers, silver-blue rivers beneath “clouds like burning aluminum,” and impossible snow peaks “cracking and shattering into jagged resplendence against the sky.” 
Balancing the epic is the intimate. Fluent in Mandarin, Ezell chats with farmers, shopkeepers, lamas, nomads, and police along way. There is also outrage in Ezell’s account, as, over the course of many years and numerous trips, he witnesses the rise of militarization, surveillance, and destructive resource extraction, including open-pit mining and the death of rivers by the blunt force trauma of dams. 
Readers were first treated to the visceral beauty of Ezell’s poetic prose in A Far Corner: Life and Art with the Open Circle Tribe, the story of three years he lived among a community of Indigenous artists on Taiwan’s rugged Pacific Coast. The present work continues his exploration of remote peoples and wild landscapes, and reveals an exceptionally talented writer at the height of his craft. 
Journey to the End of the Empire is both a love song for the earth, and a cry of dissent against environmental destruction, centralized national narratives, and the marginalization of minority peoples.

Politics & Social Sciences

Ezell, Scott

Anthropology

India Be Damned: A Novel of Partition

Genre Fiction

Silk Road Centurion

Ripped away from all he had known, he fought for a new life. Now he must fight for his new family. 
In 53 B.C. Roman soldier Manius Titinius falls captive to a warband of Xiongnu, nomadic horsemen who rule the seas of grass between the Gobi Desert and Mountains of Heaven. His forced march to the east plunges him into a new world of wonder and peril. Manius has only his fighting spirit and faith in Fortuna, goddess of luck, to aid him in a faraway land: China. 
Manius rots in the Xiongnu slave camp. Until, with the help of a Chinese family, he escapes. In their frontier village he grapples with the language and learns a new way of life. Then his former captors track him down and attack. Will Fortuna stand with Manius through the siege? Will the proud Roman forge a Chinese destiny? Can he ever find his way home? 
From windswept valleys to bustling cultural crossroads ... from daring rescue missions to the daily struggle for survival on the borderlands ... Silk Road Centurion opens a gateway to an ancient realm of romance, discovery and adventure. 
"Fortuna, be with me. May I come before you with bloodied hands."

Crawford, Scott Forbes

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