Troy Parfitt is the author of Notes from the Other China: Adventures in Asia (2007), Why China Will Never Rule the World: Travels in the Two Chinas (2011), and War Torn: Adventures in the Brave New Canada (2015). Originally from New Brunswick, Canada, he is currently living in Scotland. Why China Will [...]
Shawna Yang Ryan is a former Fulbright scholar and the author of Water Ghosts (Penguin Press 2009) and mostly recently Green Island (Knopf 2016), a novel exploring the dark days of Taiwan's post-WW II White Terror period. Originally from California, Shawna Yang Ryan now lives on Oahu, where she teaches in the [...]
Bradley Winterton is a British freelance writer and book-reviewer living in Asia. He’s the author of three travel guidebooks (to Bali, Thailand and Japan, the last as co-author), and two books on operas at Macau’s annual International Music Festival. He hasn’t been home to the UK since 1990. He started [...]
T.C. Locke (aka T.C. Lin) is the author of Barbarian at the Gate: From the American Suburbs to the Taiwanese Army. The book describes how the author - soon after gaining Taiwanese citizenship - found himself called up for two years of compulsory military service in the ROC (Republic of China) army. Why [...]
An interview with Jonathan Adams, author of Welcome Home, Master: Covering East Asia in the Twilight of Old Media. American journalist Jonathan Adams reported on East Asia for a decade. Welcome Home, Master is his honest, funny, and revealing behind-the-scenes look at foreign reporting, and the reality of making a [...]
Heaven Lake is part coming-of-age tale, part travelogue – a thoughtful and thought-provoking story about faith, loneliness, and love. It takes its time with some old-fashioned pacing but rewards the patient reader. It is, I think, the best Taiwan expat novel. Regardless of how you define that category, it’s a [...]
The false certainty of hindsight makes it seem inevitable that the Japanese colony of Taiwan would, after the Second World War, come under Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) control; and it was surely logical that Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT would flee to the island in the dying days of the [...]
Lise Boehm was the pen name of Elise Williamina Edersheim Giles. She was born around 1859 in Scotland. Her father, Alfred Edersheim (1825–1889), was a Jewish convert to Christianity and a biblical scholar. In 1883, at the age of twenty-three she married Herbert Allen Giles (1845-1935), of Wade-Giles romanization system [...]
At the dawn of the seventeenth century Taiwan was an Austronesian island, inhabited by the ancestors of today’s Aborigines and largely removed from the wider currents of East Asian history. In modern Taiwan the Aboriginal peoples make up just 3 percent of the population, with most of the rest being [...]
The thriller gets off to a good start with the title. Any China–Taiwan story without “dragon” or similar Orientalist cheese in the name is a welcome reprieve from the likes of Dragon Teeth, Dragon Storm, and Operation Red Dragon. Having a dragon-free title is a minor point perhaps, but it’s [...]