When Mindy Meng Wang’s father died in 2015, the Melbourne-based musician found herself navigating grief while also organising his funeral in her home city in north-western China. It was to be an elaborate, three-day ceremony filled with prescribed rites, including burning paper effigies, ritualised crying and prayer chants. Looking back, Wang describes the experience as “completely shocking and disorienting”. “There were so many rules for what I had to do over those three days, and so many things that I could not understand,” she says. “People criticised my crying; at…
Tag: Culture
Guián review – celebration of multicultural identity through a Chinese grandmother in Costa Rica
Nicole Chi Amén, a Costa Rican woman of Chinese descent, has always been on the outside looking in. The opening scene of her moving debut feature replicates this predicament visually: her face pressed against a metal barricade, she looks through a hole in the opaque facade with interest. The camera is observing, too, and the sight of a house being torn down gradually comes into view. This was once the home of her maternal grandmother, a Guangdong native who emigrated to Costa Rica more than 60 years ago. Conceived in…
Back to the Past review – everybody’s still gun-fu fighting in time-travel sequel
Time-travel stories were briefly in the crosshairs of the Chinese censors in the early 2010s, because of how they potentially subverted “official” history. It’s not clear if the hit 2001 Hong Kong TV series A Step Into the Past – about a modern-day cop transported to the third-century BC “warring states” period – was seen as an offender. But it is evidently all go for Chinese time-travel movies now, and hence this glossy cinematic reprise of A Step Into the Past that picks up the main characters 20 years on.…
‘They want to destroy my career’: Kiwi Chow on life as a dissenting director in Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, where dissent is now characterised by silence, few dare openly criticise the government or the Chinese Communist party (CCP) that controls it. Film-maker Kiwi Chow is one of the few. “The Chinese Communist party’s practice is to try and destroy history and truth,” the 46-year-old director says from his home in the region. “It’s ridiculous that I can still live in Hong Kong without being in jail.” In a society where someone can be jailed for wearing a “seditious” T-shirt, his surprise is understandable. Chow is best…
The best of the long read in 2025
Victor Pelevin made his name in 90s Russia with scathing satires of authoritarianism. But while his literary peers have faced censorship and fled the country, he still sells millions. Has he become a Kremlin apologist? At 18, Mustafa was told his only way out of prison was to join the regime forces. After 14 years, his past as one of Assad’s fighters could get him killed When fossilised remains were discovered in the Djurab desert in 2001, they were hailed as radically rewriting the history of our species. But not…
Trump, tech barons and a title-less Andrew: how well do you remember 2025? – quiz
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‘A cave complex worthy of Batman!’ Mind-boggling buildings that showed the world a new China
In 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: “Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared.” Beneath the headline Ugly Architecture, humorous cartoons of weird buildings fill the page. There is a modernist cylinder with a neoclassical portico bolted on to the front. Another blobby building is framed by an arc of ice-cream cone-shaped columns. An experimental bus stop features a bench beneath an impractical cuboid canopy, “unable to protect you from wind,…
Labubus, TikTok and KPop Demon Hunters: how childhood went east Asian – podcast
From matcha and bubble tea to manga and Studio Ghibli, east Asian culture has become mainstream culture for millions of young people around the world. Jeff Yang, the co-author of Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now, describes to Nosheen Iqbal how after decades of American pop-cultural exceptionalism, the Covid-19 pandemic ushered in a new era of interest in east Asian culture, particularly as western attitudes towards subtitles shifted. The pair discuss the influence of social media on young people, the South Korean government’s deliberate…
‘The bullying can’t go on’: the film-maker following Filipino fishers under siege by China
During a televised debate in 2016, populist presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte made a typically belligerent statement that he himself would jetski to Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea and plant a Philippine flag there. Duterte claimed that he was ready to die a hero to keep the Chinese out of the bitterly contested maritime territory. “That made millions of Filipino workers and fishers vote for him because of that one promise,” says film-maker Baby Ruth Villarama. As her new Oscar and Bafta-contending documentary Food Delivery: Fresh from the West…
Preparation for the Next Life review – deeply felt story of love among the marginalised in New York
Chinese-American film-maker Bing Liu made an impression with the poignant documentary Minding the Gap about people from his home town in Illinois; now he pivots to features with this sad and sombre study of romance and life choices among those on the margins of US society, adapted from the prize-winning novel of the same name by Atticus Lish. The scene is the no-questions-asked world of New York’s Chinatown; newcomer Sebiye Behtiyar plays Aishe, a Chinese Uyghur Muslim undocumented immigrant. One day she catches the eye of Skinner, played by Fred…