Tag: Asia

The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan by Christopher Benfey

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This book should be required reading for all who want to talk about Korea’s constant, deep-seated anxiety regarding the lack of a place in the Western imagination held by South Korea, and many Koreans’ jealousy of the place that Japan and China have in the Western mind, the foolish attempts to “brand” Korea and market the country onto the imaginative map of Westerners, and so on. What Benfey’s book shows is that Tokyo and Kyoto were not built in a day, and certainly not just in the 20th century. We might remember history as if Americans got interested in Japan …

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Genes and Culture: Ear Rice, Light Sweat, Red Faces, Drinking Places

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There’s a few neat fact most people seem not to know, regarding genetic differentiations between East Asians and everyone else, and it they’re neat enough to post the going theories about… One particular trait that came into the news a few years ago (2006) is related to sweat and ear wax. (That there was the layperson’s link, but if you want the hard science and have access to Nature, look here.) Which one’s grosser? Ear wax? Okay. Well, there are two kinds of ear wax in humans: brown, wet, waxy stuff, and yellowish-white, drier, flaky stuff. If you’re a Northeast …

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Thailand: A Short History (2nd Edition) by David K. Wyatt

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History is not just a procession of Great Men, kings and generals and high priests. We all know this, we insist upon it. Yet it is difficult to tell the story of history without discussing these figures, not only because we know so much more about them than we do about the commoners for so much of history, but also because of the degree to which their decisions, agendas, and problems influenced, shaped, and determined the lives of those around them. When we want to know something of a particular historical period, history becomes a Shakespearean play, complete with clowns, …

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A History of Modern Burma by Michael W. Charney

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I read A History of Modern Burma as part of the research for my current fiction project, and as histories go, I’m happy with what I learned as well as the perspective I gained from the text. Charney is clear, thoughtful, and quite balanced: he tries to at least make clear the kinds of thinking and motivation that underlied the military rulers of Burma in ages past and present, differentiating between them and their policies, as well at working to show what effect those policies had on the common people of Burma. Another point of strong interest is the role …

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Speaking of Global SF…

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Here’s a piece on Indian SF, via, er, I’ve lost the source among my millions of windows. (Sorry!) Apparently, it’s a much bigger market in various regional languages, but some SF authors also see developing an English-language readership as a key to a bigger audience. And here’s a recent piece on SF in China. Interestingly, SF entered China in 1902 in the same form it did South Korea (or, well, the Korean language, at least) in 1907 — that is, in the form of a translation of a novel by Verne. (In China, the respected literati Lu Xun translated Verne’s …

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