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Book review: Yiming Ma's These Memories Do Not Belong To Us imagines China as imperial hegemon

Book review: Yiming Ma's These Memories Do Not Belong To Us imagines China as imperial hegemon

Straits Times2 days ago
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Shanghai-born writer Yiming Ma, who now lives in Toronto, New York and Seattle, is the author of These Memories Do Not Belong To Us (2025).
By Yiming Ma
Fiction/Mariner Books/Hardback/224 pages/$35.92
Under the new Qin (formerly China) world order, traditional storytelling – its emotional ambiguities and moral ambivalences – is becoming obsolete. In its place are Memory Epics, vetted memories and histories transferred as facsimiles across minds through a cranial device called Mindbank.
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