Vacuum

In 2013, there were 319,325 migrant workers in Hong Kong. About half were Indonesian and nearly all were women....

Connected and Disconnected

WHEN GARETH EVANS visited Saigon on his way to London in 1968, it wasn’t exactly a common travel route,...

Those you cannot see

ON A RAINLESS monsoon Sunday, she walks to the electric train station closest to her house. She turns back...

Into the air, into the sky, into the clouds

OUR VAN FLOATED on the river of mid-morning Kandy traffic. As though we had dropped anchor, we drifted forward...

What happened to ‘old Asia’?

ON THE MONGOLIAN steppe roams a dog with the unfortunate name of ‘Rabies’. Some years ago, while I was...

Metaphors

They don’t explain. They don’t connect. They don’t mean what they say. They don’t say what they mean. They...

Uniquely unique, with reason

WITH CHINA’S RISE, understanding what the country’s political elite thinks is no longer a matter that concerns just China...

Tinderbox

BACK WHEN THEY’VE not yet met, Ameer wears a pressed shirt in his profile picture, Ada a cellophane stare....

Papercuts and bloodlines

Cargoes

The first time we were here it was just the two of us, Lindsey and me. We stayed at the Chelsea and I got my hair cut there by a hairdresser who had done Dee Dee Ramone’s that morning. Nothing unusual in that. She’d cut his hair for years, she told me. I never discovered if it was true or not. I wanted it to be true. Dee Dee’s hair was no fixed thing though.... Johnny’s was the iconic Ramones hair, so that’s the cut I got. No one at home had that. And Johnny threw his hair forward when he stabbed at his guitar, as if hair could be another weapon.

The power of stories

‘CIVILISATION OFFICIALLY ENDED today,’ the ever-pithy Jane Caro tweeted forty-eight hours before Anzac Day 2015. She was not referring...

Afraid of waking it

HE SET THE camera up by the wall in the space he used as his studio. It was one...