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H.M.A. Leow

H.M.A. Leow

Rooted in postcolonial Southeast Asia, H.M.A. Leow writes from the crossings of cultures and stories. She has a scholarly background in multi-ethnic US American history and literature, with a career bridging the newsroom and the classroom. Her art and research center on gender, ethnicity, and narrative, but her interests are curious and catholic.

Actor Keanu Reeves poses for a portrait, circa 1990.
Arts & Culture

How Keanu Reeves Radically Rescripts Race

Reeves’s career showcases his transnational mobility as well as a representational flexibility granted by the melding of races, ethnicities, and cultures.
From the Chaozhou Museum, a branch of The Overseas Chinese History Museum of China
Politics & History

Going Postal at the Qiaopiju

The Chinese Qiaopiju, or “overseas letter offices,” lasted for a century, ending only when the foreign governments implemented anti-communist banking controls.
A silhouette of a spy overlaying a communist flag
Politics & History

Lai Teck, International Man of Mystery

A Vietnamese double agent who infiltrated and led the Communist Party of Malaya in the 1930s, Lai Teck also spied for the British and the Japanese.
A Punjabi-Mexican American couple, Valentina Alarez and Rullia Singh posing for their wedding photo in 1917
Politics & History

The “Mexican-Hindus” of Rural California

Anti-Asian immigration restrictions led male Punjabi farm workers in California to marry Mexican and Mexican American women, creating new cultural bonds.
From the cover of Feeling Asian American by Wen Liu
Politics & History

Racial Hierarchies: Japanese American Immigrants in California

The belief of first-generation Japanese immigrants in their racial superiority over Filipinos was a by-product of the San Joaquin Delta's white hegemony.
Arts & Culture

Revolutionary Writing in Carlos Bulosan’s America

Bulosan’s fiction reflects an awareness of the inequality between the Philippines and the US and connects that relationship to his own class experience.
Students attending a lesson in lecture hall
Arts & Culture

Heritage Bilinguals and the Second-Language Classroom

So-called heritage learners are forcing educators to rethink and reframe their approaches to teaching second languages in the classroom.
A prisoner under escort at the South Western Front during the Irish Civil War, 1922
Politics & History

Lessons for American Zionism from the “Free Ireland” Cause

In the early twentieth century, American Zionists were inspired by what they saw as parallels with the political objectives of Irish nationalists.
Sui Sin Far
Arts & Culture

Sui Sin Far, the Chinese Canadian-American Sentimentalist

The short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance should be read in the context of nineteenth-century sentimentalism, which was shaped by Christian morality.
The cover of Dictee by Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha
Language & Literature

A “Genre-Bending” Poetic Journey through Modern Korean History

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée is an experiment in both lyric and epic modernism that uses form to invoke the tragedy of the wartime partition of Korea.
Politics & History

The British Empire’s Bid to Stamp Out “Chinese Slavery”

The mui tsai custom, which the British saw as a Chinese practice, relied on connections made across the multiracial landscape of colonial Malaya.
Singapore Hokkien Street food stalls, 1971
Language & Literature

Separated by a Common Language in Singapore

Singapore English is famous for its sentences that end with the particle lah. But what does it mean when people use the particle one instead?
Korean style assorted savory pancakes
Business

K-cuisine in Malaysia: Are Locals Biting?

By neglecting local tastes and the culinary presence of Korean migrants, state-sponsored initiatives to globalize Korean food may fall short in Malaysia.
A security officer keeps watch at the entrance of Tom Liquor store at the intersection of Florence and Normandy in South Los Angeles, 201
Politics & History

What Convenience Stores Say About “Urban War Zones”

The Korean-owned corner shop in a Black neighborhood serves as shorthand for racial conflict, obscuring Los Angeles’s intersectional histories.
Sun Yat Sen
Politics & History

Remembering Sun Yat Sen Abroad

Museums around the world honor the history of the revolutionary, but as Singapore’s Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall shows, those memories aren’t easy to read.
A drawing of a microphone
Arts & Culture

Performing Memory in Refugee Rap

Hip-hop and other performative arts offer Southeast Asian American immigrants a way to construct richer narratives about the refugee experience.
Georgette Chen, Self Portrait, c. 1946
Art & Art History

The Genius of Georgette Chen

Little known outside of Singapore and Malaysia, Georgette Chen was an iconic artist of the Nanyang Style.
The covers of Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by Hmong Americans and How do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology
Arts & Culture

Searching for Home in Hmong American Writing

Two significant poetry anthologies deterritorialize home, showing that for Hmong Americans, home can be a process of moving and running despite living in a place.
The cover of the album A Grain of Sand
Arts & Culture

Charting the Music of a Movement

Galvanized by an act of racial violence, the band A Grain of Sand brought a new version of Asian American activism and identity to the folk music scene.
José Garcia Villa
Arts & Culture

José Garcia Villa, an American Poet Ahead of His Time

While Villa’s otherness created an opening for his work in the US, American critics ultimately held both his modernism and his nationality against him.
Several entries in the Miss Teen Vietnam pageant attend the closing night awards gala for the 8th annual Asian World Film Festival at Saban Theatre on November 18, 2022 in Beverly Hills, California.
Arts & Culture

What Does It Take to Be Crowned Miss Vietnam USA?

Beauty pageants, a familiar part of post-war diasporic Vietnamese culture, help participants and viewers forge new identities amid forces of globalization.
Shortcomings
Arts & Culture

Shortcomings Shows the Loneliness of Refusing to “See” Race

Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel forces the reader to surveil the world through the eyes of its protagonist, Japanese American theater manager Ben Tanaka.
A doctor in the Philippines checks a patient’s blood pressure assisted by Filipina Nurse C.P. De Batan, 1963
Politics & History

Who’s Afraid of the Filipina Coed?

Cultural depictions of the "transpacific Filipina" reflected anxieties about the changing education and social roles of women in the Cold War Philippines.
Visitors at the Richmond night market near Vancouver
Education & Society

Traveling Through Time and Space in the Richmond Night Market

A night market in suburban Vancouver originated with Chinese immigrants, but its structure and management have raised questions over its supposed authenticity.
The covers of two books, Not Out of Hate by Ma Ma Lay and Irrawaddy Tango by Wendy Law-Yone.
Arts & Culture

Burmese Women Novelists Speak Out

The novels of Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone challenge the limits placed on the voices of Burmese women in the twentieth century.

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