Years before he invaded Ukraine, she tried to warn us that Putin was committing war crimes — The original version of this article, coauthored by Aimee Liu and Deborah Jones, appeared the week after Anna was assassinated — on Vladimir Putin’s birthday in 2006. Two years earlier, in her book Putin’s Russia, Anna attempted to alert western readers to the totalitarian threat that Putin represented to Russia…

Author of East-West novels and all sorts of nonfiction, ghostwriter, MFA advisor, former painter… and current photopainter! — Novels! If you love novels about Americans in Asia and Asians in America and the families that form between them, you may have read my fiction. In the 1990s I published two novels, Face and Cloud Mountain, based on my family’s mixed-race history and my examination of my own Chinese-American identity:

The saga of Alfred Bird and the Singapore War Crimes Trials suggests they did — Seventy-seven years ago, in one of the last official surrender ceremonies of World War II, Singaporeans gathered in their city center, in front of the grand façade of the Supreme Court Building, to witness Japan’s formal return of Singapore to British colonial rule. Singaporeans, like other Asians, had suffered innumerable…

They’re a commodity unlike any other — We are collectively witnessing a mass shooting every day in America. That translates to more than 350 lives of babies, children, teachers, doctors, mothers and fathers and so many others snuffed out every week. The United States has the highest murder rate of any developed nation. And every expert who’s…

Answers to long-buried family questions can provide new clues into inter-generational trauma — I suspect that every family keeps secrets. That’s why they’re a staple of family stories. I might go so far as to say they’re the reason we tell family stories at all: to expose and decode those secrets. But when families are divided by migration, cultural differences, and language barriers…

Surprise! Not everything you think you know about your relatives is true — This morning I received an email that torpedoed one of my family’s central myths. My father and his siblings always told the rest of us that their grandfather was “the Viceroy of Canton.” Naturally, our extended family took that as gospel — even if we could never identify the specific…