The standout successful English-language book about Taiwan in recent years – well, other than the perennial chart-topping Lonely Planet travel guide – has been Cathy Erway’s The Food of Taiwan: Recipes from the Beautiful Island. Normally I would read such a bestseller right away, if not from interest, then at [...]
Ed Lin’s Ghost Month (2014) incorporates several quintessential Taiwanese elements – religious superstitions, gangsters, night markets, and betel-nut girls – into a murder mystery. It’s set during the seventh month of the Chinese calendar (typically falling in August), a time when the dead roam the world of the living. The [...]
In the years after China’s “Liberation” (as an aside, China's “liberation” should always be used with quotation marks) a steady stream of leftist visitors paid court to Mao Zedong’s PRC and came away enthusiastically repeating CCP propaganda. Likewise, there were many “useful idiots” on the right who returned from stage-managed [...]
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 [...]