Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
“THE CURIOUS THING ABOUT PANDEMICS,” I read in a back issue of The Guardian, “is that novelists don’t seem to know what to do with them.” Well, that is one of the curious things about pandemics. “But when they have written memorably about them,” the critic continues, “it tends to have been as allegories for … Read more
PANDEMIC BRINGS US TO PANDEMONIUM, not the center of Hell—Pandemonium in Milton’s Paradise Lost—but tumult, chaos, the upending of our quotidian lives due to the infernal virus, on which we have conferred the somewhat majestic title, Novel Corona Virus-19. Normalcy is a far-away country, and even with all its attendant and even discordant notes, seems … Read more
Among many art, music and literature lovers, particularly devotees of Modernism, the expatriate community in France during the Jazz Age represents a remarkable convergence of genius in one place and period—one of the most glorious in history. Drawn by the presence of such avant-garde figures as Joyce and Picasso, artists and writers fled the censorious … Read more
When Olivier and Rui joined their parents at the age of seven as undocumented immigrants in Paris, neither of them knew if they would ever belong to their new city. When Xue left China as a political refugee at the age of 40, he brought to Paris the taste of home with his frying pan. … Read more