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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.

Painting of Song Ong Siang by J. Wentscher, 1936
Arts & Culture

Writing a “Different Type of Chinese” into Being

The Western-educated Straits Chinese elite of colonial Malaya were among the first writers to produce a local literature in the English language.
Cambodian New Year's celebration, Trairatanaram Temple, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1988
Education & Society

Tapping Cultural Values Against Domestic Violence

Southeast Asian Americans navigated evolving cultural norms while building grassroots organizations to combat violence against women.
Nizamiye Mosque in Midrand, Greater Johannesburg, South Africa
Language & Literature

Recovering the Malay Manuscripts of South Africa

Descendants of those trafficked from Southeast Asia to South Africa by the Dutch, Cape Malay Muslims use surviving kietaabs to connect to their heritage.
Miné Okubo
Arts & Culture

The Contested Legacy of Miné Okubo’s World War II Art

Okubo’s art showed the work of Japanese Americans forced to rehabilitate both the “enemy alien” on the home front and the enemy in the Pacific after the war.
A riveter at work, circa 1940.
Politics & History

Could “Rosie the Riveter” Be Chinese American?

Despite having their citizenship withheld before the war, Chinese American women in the Bay Area made significant contributions to the wartime labor force.
The covers of three Chinese Science Fiction novels
Arts & Culture

What’s so Chinese About Science Fiction from China?

Commentators have latched onto science fiction to explain all manner of social phenomena in China, from unemployment and the economy to air pollution.
Internees at the barracks of the internment camp in Boven-Digoel
Politics & History

Boven Digoel, the Prison Camp in the “Siberia of Indonesia”

The number of ethnic Chinese incarcerated in Boven Digoel in the 1920s was low, but the New Guinea colonial prison nonetheless shaped Sino-Malay literature.
The cover of Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong
Arts & Culture

Monique Truong and the New Southern Gothic

Truong’s second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, expands the region and the meaning of “the South” in contemporary literature.
Battleship NEW YORK at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard dry dock, Bremerton, Washington, ca. 1914
Politics & History

Postcolonial Pacific: The Story of Philippine Seattle

The growth of Seattle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is inseparable from the arrival of laborers from the US-colonized Philippines.
Famous Chicken Rice in Singapore
Education & Society

The Singaporean State on a Styrofoam Plate

Hawker centers, a uniquely Singaporean institution, bring a form of street commerce practiced around the world under the authority of state regulators.
No. 27 - Kakegawa: Akibayama Fork, from the series The Tôkaidô Road - The Fifty-three Stations, also known as the Reisho Tôkaidô, between 1847 and 1852
Economics

How a Rice Economy Toppled the Shogun

The co-existence of economies—one based on rice, the other on money—pushed the Tokugawa government toward financial misery and failure.
An Indian bistro in New York City
Business & Economics

The Shrewd Business Logic of Immigrant Cooks

Savvy observers, immigrant restaurateurs operate as amateur anthropologists who analyze their potential customers to determine how to best attract them.
The Children's Reading Room at the 135th street Branch of the New York Public Library
Arts & Culture

Nella Larsen’s Lessons in Library School

Larsen’s novels were influenced by her training in the New York Public Library system, where she faced rigid ideas about the racial classification of knowledge.
The Sympathizer
Arts & Culture

The Ethics of On-Screen Violence in The Sympathizer

Film scholar Sylvia Shin Huey Chong offers a feminist reflection on the theme of rape in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Sympathizer.
Bangsawan, Malay opera Penang, circa 1895
Arts & Culture

Gonna Make You a (Bangsawan) Star

The bangsawan theater in early twentieth-century Malaya offered women a chance to build a public identity beyond marriage and motherhood.
Sejarah Melayu, or Malay Annals
Arts & Culture

The Princess Brides of the Malay Annals

Narratives about women as gift objects in classical literature show the power dynamics of trade and diplomacy in the early modern Malay world.
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.

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