This engrossing novel of expat life in Taipei in the late 1950s is a story which stays with you. That’s due, in part, to the interesting, believable characters, but also because the ending leaves a few threads untied. The minor mystery of the “Narcissus” in the title is easily enough [...]
Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges – long-time China watchers and prolific authors – seek to lay out the facts about Xi Jinping without prejudice and bombast. And they succeed. Some might say the subtitle itself, “The Most Powerful Man in the World,” is bombastic. It’s not. It happens to be [...]
Taiwan’s greatest sports story occurred during the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945). The Kano baseball team, a ragtag band of players from a two-bit school in a backwater city, defied the odds to reach the final of the 1931 Koshien High School Baseball Tournament in Osaka. The team came from a [...]
It’s been sad watching the decline in popularity of the travelogue over the last quarter century. I remain hopeful, however, that there can be a renaissance of the genre, because a good travel book is an inherently wonderful blend of fun and fact. This satisfying mix of escapist pleasure and [...]
Aaron Friedberg would be justified in adopting an “I told you so,” attitude to the West’s belated waking up to its failed engagement project with China. In articles and books such as Contest for Supremacy (2011), the American political scientist has long warned about the China threat. However, in Getting [...]
It would take a cold heart not to fall in love with this book from its very opening pages, where in evocative yet never overcooked prose veteran Japan writer Amy Chavez describes the daily rhythms of island life in the coming and going of fishing boats and ferries as seen [...]
The United States vs. China: The Quest for Global Economic is a sober, sensible warning about the potential dangers of various possible futures that lie ahead as China matches the United States in economic might and overtakes it in the coming decades. The China challenge will be different from the [...]
The plainspeople from China brought the legal notion of land title. Well, my father often jokes, “It used to be that if a Paiwan person had walked through a place leaving footprints with his own two feet enough times, that place belonged to him.” Precious little literature from Taiwan’s Indigenous [...]
Is the English-language bookshelf already too full of novels set in pre-WW2 China? Has that rich seam of Shanghai ore not been thoroughly exhausted? And on a broader note, is it time to move on from the Second World War? No, no, and thrice no. Shanghai was by population count [...]
“No poetry or memoirs,” warn some publishers in their submission guidelines. To be paired with poetry – yes, cruel, but the truth is often cruel. The fact is that the general reading public is not interested in non-celebrity memoirs, and the number of sales (or copies given away) is usually [...]