Dressed in her Sunday best, eighty-six-year-old Hilaria Bustamante stood by the roadside waiting with a warm, friendly smile on her face. The tiny woman was …
Read Full StoryCatch-22: Cambodia and Its Haunted Cycles
“There is a saying here,” a Phnom Penh journalist told me jovially as we drove past the Tonle Sap river at sunset: “the Chinese chase …
Read Full StoryEveryone Calls Me Mama
It’s hard to miss her even in a crowd. At about 4-feet high, 65-year-old Kong Zhenlan was barely taller than the children in her care, …
Read Full StoryPicasso of The East
It’s not what you think. When the late Chinese master painter Zhang Daqian is referred to as “Picasso of the East” – it doesn’t mean …
Read Full StoryPied Piper
“I find Hong Kong has changed.” It’s the first thing voter Peter Tsai said as he came out of the polling station: “It is no …
Read Full StoryBrothers, In Arms
It was a very hot day. The unforgiving kind that left nowhere to hide. Cradled within the sweltering curves at the centre of one of …
Read Full StoryFalling Out Of Love With Leung
As love affairs go, it could count among the shortest. Not even an hour into office and already Hong Kongers were clamouring for their newly-inaugurated …
Read Full StoryAn Evening of Echoes
The half-hour fireworks display in Victoria Harbour is long over, but the tens of thousands of voices that were raised in protest in Hong Kong …
Read Full StoryIsland of Broken Dreams
It shimmers shyly in the Western Pacific like an unpolished diamond in a nest of sparkling opals. Its size belying its strategic geographical importance. Saipan …
Read Full StoryHouse of Cards: Lessons from Japan
March 11, 2011 is a date no one in Japan will forget. The “triple whammy” was like nothing any other country has been subjected to, …
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