Tag Archives: Wall Street Journal

Ghosts of Gold Mountain: Who Built the American Railroad? 

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Chinese workers in the snow constructing the first American transcontinental railways

In the 1860s, roughly 20,000 Chinese from the Guangdong province were shipped to America to labour at building the transcontinental railways. They came for the lure of gold. However, few of them moved outside their camp or learnt English. They faced a lot of hardships, breaking rocks and living for a pittance. What drove them there? What did they face? 

Author Gordon H. Chang  has uncovered the plight of these workers in his latest book, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. Chang is Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities at Stanford University. He has written a number of books on Asian-American history and US–East Asian interactions. 

Washington Independent Review of Books says Chang “ has dedicated himself to speaking for a group that cannot speak for itself, even in absentia. He’s dubbed them the ‘ghosts’ of his title because, while the work they did was about as tangible as it gets, their individual identities have evaporated. Read more

The war in Sri Lanka and its aftermath: the Kitaab interview with Samanth Subramanian

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The government’s tolerance of Buddhist extremism and the clergy’s power in Sri Lanka is feeding an unsavoury majoritarianism, and that never bodes well for any country, says Samanth Subramanian, the author of This Divided Island, in this interview with Zafar Anjum.

Author Photo - 2Samanth Subramanian is an Indian journalist and writer. He has an undergraduate degree in journalism from Pennsylvania State University and a Master’s in international relations from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He has written, among other publications, for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Mint, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Far Eastern Economic Review, The New Republic, The Huffington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National and The Hindu. His first book of narrative non-fiction, Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast, won the 2010 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2013 Andre Simon Prize. His new book, This Divided Island, traces the aftermath of the war in Sri Lanka and how it is shaping the Sri Lankan society.

In your first book (Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast), you followed fish. In your second book, the Tigers. What prompted you to pick up this serious subject? Anything else besides the journalistic impulse (as you mentioned in an interview with The Hindu)?

The journalistic impulse was, I have to admit, the strongest motivating factor – but even that journalistic impulse is really just plain, simple curiosity. I was curious about the changes that a three-decade war can wreak upon the psyche of an individual or a country, and about the texture of life during such a long war. It helped immensely, of course, that I’m Tamil, and that I’ve been following the war with varying degrees of interest for nearly two decades now; I speak Tamil, and Sri Lanka is right next door. I’d have been similarly curious about a war in faraway Somalia, say, but it would have been far more difficult for me to write a book from there. Read more

Salman Rushdie’s ‘Shalimar the Clown’ opera to open in 2016: WSJ

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Salman Rushdie“There is one thing happening that I am excited about. The St. Louis opera company is making an opera of “Shalimar the Clown,” novelist Salman Rushdie told the Wall Street Journal on November 21. “They have a 2016 premiere date and so far I been having meetings every so often to discuss it.”

His new novel

“I am writing a novel right now so not reading much else,” he said about his latest work. “I’m slow, this book is getting itself written, I will take two years on it. I am a one thing at a time guy. Now I am very much focused on this.” Read more

What can literature teach us about handling money?

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A Wall Street Journal writer recently decided to seek out the financial lessons embedded in works by classic 19th-century authors like Tolstoy and Flaubert. It turns out that the great writers knew a thing or two about money: CSM

What do business books and 19th-century literature – seemingly polar opposites – have in common?

A lot, in turns out.

Money – and the social changes its possession or lack thereof effects – forms the backbone of so many works of literature that one Wall Street Journal writer decided to read the classics with an eye toward extracting financial lessons. Read more