Hong Kong police have recently arrested book sellers for having copies of Emily Feng’s, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom. Freelance journalists and three others have been arrested related to the book and for the act of selling, “seditious material.” Emily Feng has been banned from entering China since 2022 due to her previous reporting and now the banned book. “Seditious Material,” is the title that sounds less than harmful for many Westerners who may view China as a land known of having less freedoms, where independent thinking and writing, are prohibited or heavily guided. The reporter and...

Most Sunday’s, weather allowing, I set up a mobile comic book shop at local open air markets. I have done it for the good part of a decade, in doing so you make unique friendships with people who you may only see every so many Sundays over the years, you might not even know their names but you know their opinions on things, what books they read, movies they watch and at times the turmoils in their personal life. In being a fixture, you can be both councillor and sound board or, for some kids, an adult for them to share budding and developing opinions with. It’s a fascinating thing to see the...

I spent a lot of time dealing with the victim of violence. That betrayal only a lover can express, the sinister switch from affection or at least the performance required to invent love, to twist into a tantrum of rage. The bruising and cuts, a secondary blistering to a pain that seldom heals. Perhaps can not heal. “I would die for you, I would kill for you,” such men squirm, maybe they believe it. At least when they are forged inside of their own egotistical certainty. Yet, despite such promises, they don’t protect their lover-victim from themselves. The imbalance is perhaps a calculation...

“Everything in my life is controlled, living is becoming too expensive. I have no dreams. My only joy is thinking about dying.” Ji-woo, nineteen years of age. It seems, especially to older generations, the youth are giving up. A malaise and wider apathy has taken hold among the younger generations of East Asia. In China it has been called, Tang Ping, or ‘Laying Flat’. In Japan, Hikikomori, or ‘Pulling Inwards’ and in South Korea, they have become known as the N-po generation or ‘Resting Youth’. It’s not that these sentiments are exclusive to East Asia, or any particular laziness found inside...