Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.) This book on China and the Chinese will contain no apologies. It will present no strenuous effort, where uncomplimentary revelations are made, to drag in some supposedly extenuating or counterbalancing virtue possessed by the [...]
Banal as it is to say, China’s changing. Ever since Deng Xiaoping’s historic “Reform and Opening” policy, the country has embarked on more than three decades of unprecedented growth. It is a country riddled with contradictions; it’s also one that, in many ways, defies explanation. Fortunately, in his new book, [...]
What’s the laziest way of writing a book? Throw together your blog posts or diary entries? No, that still requires you to have written something. An anthology? And one from a writer’s group or “colony.” Fiction or non-fiction, no problem, and let the laziest artists submit poems: “I’m still working [...]
It all started with a sex-crazed American expat asking an unsuspecting Hong Kong woman to strip. Well, kind of. Cartoonist Larry Feign had just moved to Hong Kong, and he and his wife, Cathy, were in the kitchen cooking. Feign asked her in Cantonese if she wanted some “choi sum” [...]
How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia explores the feminine side of expat life. Edited by Hong Kong-based writer Shannon Young, the anthology covers the stories of 26 women, mostly split between China, Hong Kong and Japan (from Tokyo to Fukushima), and differs [...]
Shannon Young’s Year of Fire Dragons begins and ends with a dragon dance celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival. What transpires in between is a delightful account of one year in a young American woman’s life in one of the most exciting and unique cities in the world. Like a museum tapestry [...]
Good Chinese Wife, a memoir published by Sourcebooks, is a poignant tale that expats should enjoy about the overlap of China and the West. Susan Blumberg-Kason details her unfortunate marriage to a Chinese music scholar, as they meet while studying in Hong Kong and then travel to his hometown in [...]
A poor man’s Marco Polo, Hendrick Hamel was the first European to write a detailed account of Korea. The twenty-two-year-old bookkeeper was serving aboard the Dutch East India Company’s Sperwer (Sparrowhawk) as it set sail on July 30, 1653, from the Dutch settlement of Anping, Formosa. Laden with a cargo [...]
The value of any kind of travel narrative is meted out not in the immediate present but slowly over time, which only adds to the torture of writing them. Oftentimes both reader and writer don’t really know what they’ve really got on their hands until five, ten, or even fifteen [...]
Taiwan is a superb destination for rail fans: there’s the new bullet train, Taipei’s showcase MRT, the scenic East Coast railways, the busy main trunk western line, quaint branch lines, and the magnificent Alishan narrow-gauge forestry railway, which climbs a stunning two-thousand meters. Not that you’d know that from the [...]
