Category: Exclusive
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Editor’s note: Read an excerpt from Lydia Kwa’s A Dream Wants Waking HERE. Lydia Kwa, A Dream Wants Waking, Buckrider Books, 2023. 226 pgs. In my latest novel A Dream Wants Waking (Buckrider Books, 2023), excerpted here, there is a…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “Alternative Intelligence: On Brains, Being and the Nonhuman” by Lydia Kwa](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/a-dream-wants-waking-lydia-kwa.jpg?w=1000)
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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
![Protected: [EXCLUSIVE] “Ashen and Split: A Correspondence with Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng” by Alex Tan](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/qnh_history-draft.png?w=1024)
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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
![Protected: [EXCLUSIVE] “Love or Enemy? South Korea’s Churches at a Crossroads” by Woojin Son](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/love-or-enemy-south-koreas-churches-at-a-crossroads-2.png?w=1024)
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“What would you think about moving here?” We were on a bus heading to Hong Kong International Airport on Lantau Island. It was dark outside. We were going to catch an early-morning flight back home to Seattle. The motion of…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “The Chinese Girl” by Jeff Beyl](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/screenshot-2024-07-03-at-06.31.04.png?w=1024)
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Chris Song’s note: In “A Night Flight”, the passengers endure days of eerie silence and mounting despair, with many succumbing to death and some choosing to leap into the night. The story draws a haunting parallel to the Flight MH370…
![[TRANSLATION] “A Night Flight” by Liu Waitong, translated by Chris Song](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/liu-waitong_cha.png?w=1024)
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It is difficult, at best, to take a leisurely walk in Hong Kong. The streets are congested with cars and trucks and buses, and the sidewalks are jam-packed with people. It is said that Hong Kong is a study in…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “He Wrote On” by Jeff Beyl](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/cha-an-asian-literary-journal.jpg?w=1024)
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茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS 茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS [ESSAY] “Rather Demolish Ten Temples Than Destroy One Marriage: Tiantian Zheng’s Violent Intimacy” by Laurence Westwood Tiantian Zheng, Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China,…
![[ESSAY] “Rather Demolish Ten Temples Than Destroy One Marriage: Tiantian Zheng’s 𝑉𝑖𝑜𝑙𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝐼𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑐𝑦” by Laurence Westwood](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/violent-intimacy-family-harmony-state-stability-and-intimate-partner-violence-in-post-socialist-china.jpg?w=1000)
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茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS 茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS [ESSAY] “Hot Popping Momma!: Reading Jin Yong in Translation, Part II” by Jeff Tompkins Read “Reading Jin Yong in Translation, Part I” HERE.Click HERE to read all entries in Cha on John Minford. Jin Yong,…
![[ESSAY] “Hot Popping Momma!: Reading Jin Yong in Translation, Part II” by Jeff Tompkins](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/20240315172927214401contentphoto4.jpg?w=1000)
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My wife’s family keep asking me if I “like Chinese things”. We recently went back to Hong Kong to visit them. We have been back to Hong Kong many times and although they know me quite well by now, they…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “Do You Like Chinese Things?” by Jeff Beyl](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/cha-an-asian-literary-journal-1.jpg?w=1024)
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[TRANSLATION] “The Singing of the Bluebird” by Yuan Jinmei, translated by Kevin McGeary About the story: A Chinese man who grew up in poverty on a riverboat studies hard and becomes wealthy. After moving abroad, he marries a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Western…
![[TRANSLATION] “The Singing of the Bluebird” by Yuan Jinmei, translated by Kevin McGeary](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/yuan-jinmei_kevin-mcgeary.png?w=1024)
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茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS 茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS [ESSAY] “The Places We Would Rather Be: Yan Ge’s Elsewhere” by X. H. Collins Click HERE to read all entries in Cha on Yan Ge. Yan Ge, Elsewhere: Stories, Scribner, 2023. 304 pgs. I became interested…
![[ESSAY] “The Places We Would Rather Be: Yan Ge’s 𝐸𝑙𝑠𝑒𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒” by X. H. Collins](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/elsewhere-yan-ge.jpg?w=994)
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I found a small glass bottle lying in the street in Hong Kong. The bottle had no label, no embossing, no top. There was no indication of what it had originally been used for. It was just a small,…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “The Small Glass Bottle of Feathers” by Jeff Beyl](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/feathers.jpg?w=1024)
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No more the acrobats, singers and dancers,Prostitutes and pimps, criminals and chancers. …………..A green veil is drawn over all. …………..Rain drips down in an empty hall. The sound of hammers shovels and picks,Drowned out by the river of traffic,Flowing east…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “A Great World: Poem and Introduction” by Paul Bevan](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/shanghai-2012-architecture-pingwang-jie.jpg?w=1024)
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茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS 茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS [EXCLUSIVE] “Alien Bless You: A Review of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem” by Angus Stewart Derek Tsang, Andrew Stanton, Minkie Spiro, and Jeremy Podeswa (directors), 3 Body Problem, 2024. We all die.…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “Alien Bless You: A Review of Netflix’s 3 𝐵𝑜𝑑𝑦 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑚” by Angus Stewart](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/3-body-problem.webp?w=1024)
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Chris Song’s Note: “The Charred City” conveys the manic restlessness Hongkongers felt after 1997. The story is set in the stifling social atmosphere of post-Handover Hong Kong, which was “charred”, ironically by pervasive celebratory fireworks. The protagonist, at the behest…
![[TRANSLATION] “The Charred City” by Lok Fung, Translated by Chris Song](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/lok-fung-cha-an-asian-literary-journal.jpg?w=1024)
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茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS 茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS Editor’s note: Matt Turner recently read Anthony Tao’s new poetry collection, We Met in Beijing, and went to a reading of his in New York. He wrote a short “consideration” about it all…
![[ESSAY] “Anthony Tao at Sunset Bar” by Matt Turner](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/anthony-tao_cha-an-asian-literary-journal-1.png?w=1024)
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Paul Bevan’s Introduction: This story comes from a series entitled Ways and Pathways. Each story in the series follows an individual, a man or woman, as they walk from point A to point B, and sometimes back again, and focuses…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “A Walk Around the Square” by Paul Bevan](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/partial-eclipse.png?w=1024)
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Vanessa Yee-kwan Wong’s Note: “Nausea” was published in Wong Bik-wan’s 黃碧雲Tenderness and Violence 溫柔與暴烈 (Cosmo Books, 1994). Inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel of the same name (La Nausée, 1938), the story encourages an existentialist reading of Hong Kong’s political precarity…
![[TRANSLATION] “Nausea” by Wong Bik-wan, Translated by Vanessa Yee-kwan Wong](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/wong-bik-wan-1.png?w=940)
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Zheng Wang: Trips Stories of a Businessman Who Writes Poetry on Work Trips is a sequence of narrative poems in a pseudo-chronological order, a kind of spiritual diary. Its predominant theme is the imaginary persona of this Singapore-based businessman who…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “Stories of a Businessman Who Writes Poetry on Work Trips” by Zheng Wang](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/copy-of-untitled-design-7.png?w=730)
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Chinese Abacus 1814 One day, while wandering in the Mong Kok district of Kowloon, I bought an antique abacus. Known as one of the most densely populated areas on earth, Mong Kok is a busy shopping area with many open…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “The Abacus” by Jeff Beyl](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/20190329070933623.jpg?w=600)
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Chris Song’s Note: Lawrence Kwok-ling Pun’s 潘國靈 short story “Twenty Years Since Losing the City” 失城二十年 is a sequel to Wong Bik-wan’s 黃碧雲 canonical short story “Losing the City”, which gruesomely explores the despair Hongkongers felt upon the 1997 Handover and the…
![[TRANSLATION] “Twenty Years Since Losing the City” by Lawrence Kwok-ling Pun, Translated by Chris Song](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/lawrence-kwok-ling-pun-e6bd98e59c8be99d88-1.jpg?w=1024)
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茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS 茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS [ESSAY] “Kung Fu Is a Store of Infinite Fun: Reading Jin Yong in Translation, Part I” by Jeff Tompkins Read “Reading Jin Yong in Translation, Part II” HERE. Jin Yong, aka…
![[ESSAY] “Kung Fu Is a Store of Infinite Fun: Reading Jin Yong in Translation, Part I” by Jeff Tompkins](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/legends-of-the-condor-heroes--2.png?w=1024)
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Via. Faai-jee. That’s how to say, chopsticks, in Cantonese. That’s what my wife taught me. When we were first married, she taught me many Cantonese words for everyday things. One day, just kidding around, I called them choppers. As in,…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “Don’t Call em’ Choppers” by Jeff Beyl](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/screenshot-2024-02-28-at-14.47.09.png?w=1024)
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I’d nervously sweated through the last 23 hours, certain I’d be escorted to a ventilation-less detention room to wait for a flight back to the US. And now I faced a Border Control officer who looked through my passport without…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “In Beijing: 12.26-1.10” by Matt Turner](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/image0-2.jpeg?w=1024)
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Chris Song’s Note: Liu Yichang’s 劉以鬯 (1918–2018) short story “Lunar New Year’s Eve” 除夕 imagines the last day of Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 (1710–1765), author of The Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢, who is believed to have died on Lunar New Year’s…
![[TRANSLATION] “Lunar New Year’s Eve” by Liu Yichang, Translated by Chris Song](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/liu-yichang-copy.jpg?w=1024)
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“China is already a great power, and whether the next three decades will be a cold or a hot war, nothing can stop her now. By the year 2001 she will be a powerful industrial socialist State.”—Han Suyin, China in…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “Han versus Kahn: 1970” by Angus Stewart](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/han-suyin-and-herman-kahn.png?w=1024)
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Chris Song’s Note: Xu Nianci 徐念慈 (1875-1908), from Changshu, Jiangsu, was a Chinese writer, editor, and translator in the late Qing dynasty who mastered English and Japanese in his early twenties and was skilled in mathematics and writing. In 1904,…
![[TRANSLATION] “A New Tale from Mr Faluo” BY Xu Nianci, TRANSLATED BY CHRIS SONG](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/a-new-tale-from-mr.-falou-e696b0e6b395e89ebae58588e7949fe8ad9a2.png?w=880)
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Lin Huiyin, 1904-1955 (Unknown author/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain) Mike Fu’s Note: I find myself drawn to Chinese writers situated at the interstices of history, culture, and language, and whose literary works demonstrate a hybrid subjectivity, whether overt or implicit. Lin Huiyin…
![[EXCLUSIVE] Two New Translations of Lin Huiyin by Mike Fu](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/mike-fu-translations.png?w=1024)
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I blame my inability to speak Cantonese on waitresses in Chinese restaurants. My wife would say it’s all on me. To be fair, I should have kept it up. I should have practised more. You are getting better every day,…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “On Learning to Speak Cantonese” by Jeff Beyl](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/cantonese.png?w=1024)
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Also read Akin Jeje’s tribute to Reid Mitchell. I wrote two sonnets for Reid Mitchell (1955-2023); one a couple of years before he died and one, at Reid’s own instigation, some fifteen years ago. Reid had told me a story…
![[EXCLUSIVE] “Two Sonnets for Reid Mitchell” by Andrew Barker](https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/reid-michell-impression.jpeg?w=1024)
Cha 