The Financial Times just ran an article on a recent comment by Japan's foreign minister that Taiwan owes its "high educational standards" partly to Japanese colonialism. It's a good article that does a nice job explaining the Taiwan-China-Japan love-hate triangle (although really, where is the love in there besides self-love ( Read more... )

( the true story of cold day )

So I made this deal to post some part of some piece of fiction that I'm working on, no matter how unpolished it is. I did that, and got some useful feedback from Robert, with whom I had struck this deal, although Natalie seems to have abstained ( Read more... )

I made a deal with Robert to post some fiction today. Here are some bits from a story I've been working on. I wish I could post something more concrete, but I'm not even close to having a first draft finished, so what you get is a lot of sketches and stuff that won't be in the final draft. Actually, I start school again in a few days, so there may ( Read more... )

I always link to ESWN on here, basically because if I want to read anything from the Chinese-language media, is has to be through that blog. But my favorite China blog is probably Beijing of Bust. It you haven't read it, you should, whether or not you care about China. It's a thoughtful, funny, observant, and extremely well-written account of the ( Read more... )

In honor of Cingular trying to patent the idea of entering smileys into your cell phone by pressing buttons on that phone (or, if you believe the British print media, "to patent smileys"), here is a link to Geoffrey Nunberg's famous short comic essay on smileys, as pointed out by Language Log. I'd forgotten all about this essay. It's really not ( Read more... )

(1 ( Read more... )

Does anyone know what the Japanese movie Afterlife by Hirokazu Koreeda is called in Taiwan? The Japanese name is Wandâfuru raifu ("wonderful life"), and I think in Hong Kong and the mainland it's called 下一站，天國. No one in Taiwan seems to have heard of any of those titles, though.

p.s. Not now, but soon, I will finish the entry requested by Meredith

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I've been spending a lot time recently reading the work of modern Chinese and Taiwanese intellectuals like Lung Ying-tai (龍應台), who is amazing. I'm not sure why. I'm not talking about academic essays, but the kind of thing that, say, Chomsky (why is he the first example that comes to mind?) writes in the US-stuff made to have a public appeal, but ( Read more... )