Category: Essays
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茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS 茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS Editor’s note: Aastha Uprety’s essay reads Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Razan AlSalah’s A Stone’s Throw as twin elegies of engineered upheaval, where dams and pipelines reorder earth and memory. Through…
![[ESSAY] “Energies of Displacement: Transformation in Jia Zhangke’s 𝑆𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝐿𝑖𝑓𝑒 and Razan AlSalah’s 𝐴 𝑆𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑒’𝑠 𝑇ℎ𝑟𝑜𝑤”by Aastha Uprety](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/energies-of-displacement-transformation-in-jia-zhangkes-still-life-and-razan-alsalahs-a-stones-throw-by-aastha-uprety.png?w=935)
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Editor’s note: Anna Nguyen’s essay “A Dead Language” turns on an offhand slight, “No one speaks Vietnamese,” and worries it into grief, form, and theory. Between a father’s aphasic silence and a mother’s nightly monologues, Vietnamese persists. English, institutional and…
![[ESSAY] “A Dead Language” by Anna Nguyen](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/anna-nguyen.jpg?w=933)
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Editor’s note: Pál Dániel Levente, a guest of honour at the 2026 Brahmaputra Literature Festival, proposes a poetics of butterflies, stones, and blades. The five poems move within that range. India, New Delhi, Agra, and the Ganges become sites of…
![[ESSAY] “Butterflies, Stones, and Blades” by Pál Dániel Levente](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/shot-by-cerqueira-hemgxmfpsaw-unsplash.jpg?w=1024)
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Editor’s note: In this reflective essay, Gutierrez Mangansakan II recounts acting on a film by Lav Diaz to examine how Mindanao shapes Diaz’s cinema. Blending personal observation with critical analysis, he argues that the director’s duration, restraint, and resistance to…
![[ESSAY] “In Search of Mindanao in the films of Lav Diaz” by Gutierrez Mangansakan II](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/lav-diaz.webp?w=1024)
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Editor’s note: In Gutierrez Mangansakan II’s essay, growing trees in red-clay pots becomes a metaphor for exile, love, and impermanence. Through memories of family, cats, and lost homelands, he reflects on denied inheritance and chosen distance, arguing that care, memory,…
![[ESSAY] “Reflection on Exile, Impermanence, and Red Clay Pots” by Gutierrez Mangansakan II](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/aslan-and-buffy-in-the-dirty-kitchen.jpg?w=1024)
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茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS 茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS Editor’s note: Laurehl Onyx B. Cabiles considers the films Big Fish and Little Fish in relation to his father and the Filipino seafood dish kinilaw, using cinema as a lens for…
![[ESSAY] “𝐵𝑖𝑔 𝐹𝑖𝑠ℎ, 𝐿𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝐹𝑖𝑠ℎ, & The Fake Legend of Kinilaw” by Laurehl Onyx B. Cabiles](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/big-fish-little-fish.png?w=940)
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Editor’s note: Zalman S. Davis places Xuân Diệu and Huy Cận within Vietnamese literary history shaped by Confucian ethics, French colonial modernity, and revolutionary discipline. The essay reads Thơ Mới poetry as a space where male intimacy could appear through…
![[ESSAY] “Between Confession and Restraint: Queer Intimacy and the Making of Vietnamese Modernist Lyricism in Xuân Diệu and Huy Cận” by Zalman S. Davis](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/xuan-dieu-1916e280931985-and-huy-can.webp?w=700)
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Editor’s note: Cha’s long-term contributor Matt Turner introduces 6AMING, his forthcoming poetry book from Antiphony, due in September. In this short essay, he discusses time-stamped automatic writing, no-music influence, not-poetry, underground journals, and resistance to spectacle, surveillance, and institutional validation.…
![[ESSAY] “NO U-TURN—6𝐴𝑀𝐼𝑁𝐺: Themes and Contexts” by Matt Turner](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/matt-turner-6aming-cha-asian.png?w=637)
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Editor’s note: Llinos Evans’s essay traces the literary and linguistic significance of the One-Syllable Article through a detailed reading of Yuen Ren Chao’s “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”. Moving beyond its reputation as a phonetic curiosity, it argues for…
![[ESSAY] “Beyond the Stone Den: One-Syllable Articles as Literary Form—An Introduction” by Llinos Evans](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/poem.jpg?w=785)
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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
![Protected: [ESSAY] “Music, Ambition, and Quiet Longing in 𝐷𝑜 𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝐿𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝐵𝑟𝑎ℎ𝑚𝑠?” by Beth Adams](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/do-you-like-brahms_.jpg?w=426)
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茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS 茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS [ESSAY] “On the Lighter Side: Nektaria Anastasiadou’s A Recipe for Daphne” by Beth Adams Nektaria Anastasiadou, A Recipe for Daphne, Hoopoe Fiction, 2021. 326 pgs. “A monstrous confusion of civilization and…
![[ESSAY] “On the Lighter Side: Nektaria Anastasiadou’s 𝐴 𝑅𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑝𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝐷𝑎𝑝ℎ𝑛𝑒” by Beth Adams](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2021-02-12-dsc_0074-copy.jpg?w=1024)
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