How Race Shaped New York’s View of Chinese Opera
In 1930s New York, Chinese opera was praised uptown but mocked in Chinatown.
The Immigrant Photographers Who Shaped a Nation’s Image
In early twentieth-century Indonesia, Chinese-run studios brought modernity into focus.
Chinese Lion Dance Finds New Life in Newfoundland
A small Chinese Canadian community reshapes a performance tradition across generations, redefining how the art form is practiced and understood.
Caste and Culture in Kolkata’s Chinese Leather Trade
In eastern Kolkata, a Hakka Chinese community carved out an economic niche in leather production amid stigma surrounding purity and caste hierarchy.
The Wedding Ritual Where Brides Wept in Song
In southern China, weddings once began with a ritual that let brides speak the unspeakable.
When Mao’s Mango Mania Took Over China
A fleeting cult built around a mango exposes the logic, and illogic, of Mao’s personality cult.
When the Dust Settles in Colonial Manchurian Writing
Takagi Kyōzō makes heavy use of natural imagery to decry the miserable status of the settler colonist population in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.
The Chinatown Novel That Wasn’t
Examining Lin Yutang’s 1948 novel Chinatown Family, Richard Jean So reveals the ways in which literature is shaped by editorial interventions.
The Chinese Question in Australia
The local British tried to bar Chinese traders from Australian shipping routes. Louis Ah Mouy, Lowe Kong Meng, and Cheong Cheok Hong had something to say about it.
The Chinese Movie Theater in Shanghai’s “No Man’s Land”
The Isis Theater of pre-war Shanghai occupied a unique space as a Chinese-run cinema in an international “contact zone.”