Taiwanese Nazis? That’s sometimes the initial confused impression visitors get when seeing a shop sign swastika. The visitor soon reads or is told that it’s an ancient Buddhist symbol (which Hitler reversed) and it is associated with vegetarian restaurants: find a reversed swastika and you’ve found yourself vegetarian food. However, [...]
Menno Goedhart was the Netherlands representative in Taiwan from 2002 to 2010. He is the main author of The Real Taiwan and the Dutch, a guidebook to people and places connected to the seventeenth-century period of Dutch occupation. * * * How do diplomatic postings work; were you assigned to [...]
Young Chun is the author of the superb The Accidental Citizen-Soldier: The Story of an American in the Korean Army. Although an American citizen born and raised in the United States, while teaching English in South Korea, he unexpectedly discovered he was a Korean citizen (by virtue of having been born [...]
City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir is a masterpiece, one that could probably only have been written by Paul French. This narrative non-fiction account of Western gangsters in 1930s Shanghai is I think his best work – even better than Midnight in Peking, which was an investigation into the unsolved [...]
For many of us expats, a trip to the immigration office can be stressful. Apart from the hassle of paperwork, there’s always the possibility of some nasty little surprise – a new regulation, a bureaucratic screw-up, an obscure regulation unknowingly violated – which results in you rushing off to get [...]
Originally from North Carolina, Marshall Moore is an American writer, publisher, and academic living in Hong Kong. Since his debut novel The Concrete Sky (2003) he has written three further novels and three collections of short stories. His latest book is Inhospitable, a ghost story set in Hong Kong (which will be [...]
Joyce Bergvelt is the author of Lord of Formosa, a historical drama describing the fight for Taiwan in the seventeenth century between the Dutch and the pirate warlord and Ming loyalist Koxinga. Like Koxinga himself, who was born to a Japanese mother and a Chinese father, Bergvelt has lived in [...]
Shanghai Lawyer. It’s an uninspiring title and even the author’s name – Norwood F. Allman – has the dullness of an accountant about it. But Allman was very much more than just a lawyer, and his memoir is one of my all-time favourites. For breadth and depth of experience during [...]
Signal 8 Press is a Hong Kong-based publisher founded in 2010 by American expat Marshall Moore. The name comes from the system used in Hong Kong to describe typhoons; a signal 8 warning is issued for a potentially hazardous typhoon and is greeted with celebration by most residents as it means [...]
Perhaps I’ve just been unlucky in the books I’ve read, but, heavens above, diplomats are among the very dullest of writers. They have a tendency to self-importance, unnecessary detail, and verbosity, and, although their professional life calls for a certain mastery of language, too often their skill for saying a [...]