The 2002 pogrom in the Indian state of Gujarat, and especially in its largest city, Ahmedabad, left about 1,000 Muslims dead in the city, another 1,000 dead in the state, and about 140,000 homeless, some of them still living in relief camps today. The killing, one of the worst in India since partition in 1947, drew responses of horror from across India and the world. Although the assault on Muslims followed an apparent (all the facts will never be known) assault on Hindu pilgrims travelling through the railway station at Godhra, in eastern Gujarat, in which fifty-nine Hindus burned to death, most observers have argued that the response was not commensurate with the attack, and, of course, it targeted not the criminals who may have set the fire, but a community of Muslims 100 miles away.

In the first decade of the present century, Peter Hessler published three acclaimed works on China, mostly (although not exclusively) dealing with the present period. Many of the parts of the second and third volumes, in particular, initially appeared as articles in the New Yorker and National Geographic, where the deftness of Hessler's writing and his superb skills as a storyteller attracted attention well beyond the academic world. Hessler's books have also been widely and generously praised—and used in class—by teachers of contemporary China. Yet, to my knowledge, no China specialist has yet attempted a comprehensive assessment of their contribution to the deepening of American understanding of the complexities of Chinese life today. Such an assessment is the modest aim of this essay.

After the U.S. victory in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, devastated Okinawans lived off of U.S. military rations, including unfamiliar foods such as pork luncheon meat and corned beef hash. Okinawans incorporated these and other U.S.-made goods into daily life as “Amerikamun,” literally meaning “American products,” but loaded with postwar Okinawan perceptions of America, its military, and the social contexts of the goods themselves. Connotations have shifted over the postwar period, at times suggesting Okinawan appropriation of American power through consumption of “luxurious” (jōtō) U.S. goods, but throughout the postwar period reminding Okinawans of American domination during the occupation and the unwelcome aspects of continuous U.S. military basing. “American Village,” which is a hybrid, American-style shopping mall and resort, is a concretization of this ambivalence, as multiple generations of Okinawans now have the opportunity to inscribe and reinscribe the meaning of Amerikamun on their landscape.

At the turn of the fifth century, a story about a man contesting real estate with a ghost circulated in several different versions in South China. In one of the versions, a young man discovered three lacquer coffins when digging a tomb for his deceased father and had the coffins reburied elsewhere. That night, he dreamed of Lu Su 魯肅 (172–217), the powerful minister in the southern Kingdom of Wu, who angrily announced that he would exact revenge. He also dreamed of his late father, who told him that Lu Su was fighting with him over the gravesite. Later, the young man found copious blood on his father's seating mat.

The Japanese campaign in the Shan States was a shrewd tactical maneuver in the battle for Burma. It hastened the fall of Burma by weeks, if not months, and increased greatly the amount of materiel captured by the invaders or which had to be destroyed by the British and Chinese. The righting began in that area in mid-March with patrol action on the Thailand border of Karenni, a small British protectorate adjoining the Shan States on the south; but it was not until April, following the fall of Toungoo, Burma, that serious fighting occurred. Previously the only approach the Japanese had to this mountainous district was by boat up the swift, treacherous Salween river, or over jungle trails from Thailand. But with the capture of Toungoo at the end of March, they had a road from Burma to Karenni and on to the Shan States.