Writing

Will Korean manhwa replace manga?

SEOUL, South Korea — In his bag, Park Jae Dong always carries a fine-point ink brush. The mellow, aging artist speaks in few words, preferring to communicate through Korean cartoons, or manhwa, which have gained such popularity across Asia in recent years. When his...

read more

Vietnam’s forgotten victims

DANANG, Vietnam — At 46, each year of misery seems to have etched new wrinkles around Tran Thanh Dung’s angry gaze. When he was child in the early 1970s, Tran says he witnessed U.S. soldiers shoot his parents — both of whom were communist Viet Cong soldiers during the...

read more

Floating toilets to clean up Cambodia’s act

KAMPONG LUONG, Cambodia — Residents of this “floating village,” a spine of stilted shacks and huts crammed atop a tributary of the Mekong River, depend on the water below them for cooking, bathing and gathering fish for meals. Too bad they defecate in that water — a...

read more

Nothing to Envy

Many Americans may remember peering at a famous satellite photograph of the two Koreas – prosperous South Korea lit up by cities and commerce, juxtaposed with the eerie black void of North Korea. The image has become an icon, and at times a cliché, of the disastrous...

read more

Agent of influence

Anh Nguyen Khanh, a motorbike driver in the mountains outside Da Nang, a city in southern Vietnam, is only fifty-three, but he looks much older. His fourteen-year-old son was born with severe spina bifida and cannot walk; his seventeen-year-old daughter has Downs...

read more