This page presents various information about East Asia and the people who live there. I have culled the information from the Web and from my own head. Naturally, there's a lot of bias here; as always, think critically and carefully about everything you see on the web. If you're not interested in this kind of thing, you may want to go back to my main page.
The contents of this page are shown in the menu, which should be to the left.
For information about East Asian gender issues, please see my Gender page. For East Asian (okay, basically Japanese) comics and manga, please see my Manga page. For information on how to get Chinese input working in Linux, see my Linux page. I also have a few sources of East Asian music on my Music page; I have a separate page about gaming resources in Taiwan; and finally, don't forget that I also have a Chinese-language version of my site!
A few notes about East Asia and me
I started studying Mandarin in high school, and have basically continued ever since -- something like 30 years to date. I studied in Beijing for a semester my junior year of college, and I lived in Taiwan for a combined total of about eight years. I'm pretty much fluent in Mandarin, with a noticeable Taiwanese bias to my lexicon.
I have a long-term interest in a lot of different aspects of Chinese and other East Asian cultures. I studied Chinese religions in college and grad school; I have a graduate degree in the History of Asian Religions, with a specialization in Neo-Confucianism. I did my thesis on Zhu Xi's commentary on the Ox Mountain section of the Mencius.
Why East Asia? Why Chinese? I admit that my interest started in a fairly orientalist way, with a fascination for samurai and other such things when I was in middle school. Also, I was originally interested primarily in Japan. I read Japanese Inn by Oliver Statler, and I loved the book. I especially loved the woodblock prints of Hiroshige that illustrated the book; Hiroshige's "Yui, Satta-mine" is still one of my favorite pieces of art.
When it came time to choose a high school, I had a choice between one that had Japanese but wasn't as good, and a school that was better and had Chinese (Mandarin). I went for the better school, tried Mandarin, and, well, the rest is history.
I try to maintain a pretty balanced view of East Asian cultures -- as much as any white person raised in the US can. I try not to view China, Japan, Taiwan, etc. as "exotic", "other", "weird". East Asian cultures neither have it better than Western cultures, nor worse. There are different cultural tendencies in China than there are among Western cultures, but folks are folks, pretty much.
I believe very strongly that Westerners and Chinese folks need to do more to understand each other. The West has a horrible history of colonialism to overcome, and that includes overcoming the notion that "they need to learn English, but we don't need to learn anything about them". Many people even seem to believe that Westerners are incapable of learning Chinese languages, or understanding Chinese culture(s), and that the best we can do is keep each other at a respectful distance. The military industrial complex would probably prefer we not even keep it very respectful. I strongly disagree with all these wrongheaded notions; I believe that all the misunderstandings can be overcome, and that if we only engage diligently, humbly, with sincere interest and with an effort towards reducing the effects of imperialism, we can bridge any gap.
Taiwan
I lived in Taiwan for a total of about eight years: the summer of 1995, and then from 1996 to 2004. I have many fond memories of Taiwan, as well as many frustrations. But it was neither overall good nor overall bad. The experience was much more complicated than that. When people ask me to sum up the experience, I have to say, "It was just life, you know?"
Taiwan is, in case you're not clear, not Thailand. Taiwan is an island off the SE coast of Mainland China. Yet Taiwan is also, I have to say, not a part of China. The two have strong cultural links, and strong bonds of history. But this does not mean they are one country, any more than the strong historical and cultural bonds between the US and UK mean those two are one country. The PRC (People's Republic of China, also called Mainland China, the country whose capital is Beijing and which is ruled by the CCP or Chinese Communist Party) pretends that it is still the rightful owner of Taiwan, but this is no more fact than that the moon is made of green cheese. The CCP maintains this basically as a way of saving face, I believe; in their hearts, I think, they know that Taiwan is independent, but they cannot admit this unless they want to admit that fifty years of Mainland Chinese rhetoric is wrong.
Taiwan's politics are naturally enough highly concerned with the island's status. Some silly people still maintain the fiction that Taiwan will someday return to "liberate" the "motherland". Some push for closer bonds. Some push for greater independence.
I've had friends on all sides of this debate. I've had friends who supported one side or another, who were apolitical, or who didn't care, or who just wanted to stop hearing about it all the time. As a foreigner, I have no right to tell Taiwanese people what they should want. I support human rights, which I believe includes the right to decide what sort of government you live under, and that includes the rights of Taiwanese people to choose their own leaders and their own political system, regardless of what the CCP wants. For now, from what I've seen, the people of Taiwan primarily want to maintain the status quo and continue prospering in safety.
Okay, okay, but what was Taiwan like to live in? Do you want details? Again, I'd mostly say "like living anywhere else", but if you want specifics, here are a few:
That's a brief sketch of things I noticed about living in Taiwan. There were of course many other differences; ask me if you'd like more specifics. But like I said, mostly it was just life, in a slightly different place.
Here are some links about Taiwan to check out:
Sources about languages
Eventually, this section might include Korean, Japanese, etc., but for now, it's just about Chinese.
Chinese is quite an interesting language. Or rather, I should say, languages. Chinese is no more a single language than the Latin-based languages or the Germanic languages are; Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese (or Min, which it is a part of) and the other "dialects" are all at least as separate as, say, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish are. They have significantly different grammars, vastly different phonetics and quite different vocabularies. The tendency in English to call them all one "language" is, I think, partly an artifact of the tendency among Chinese people to see a unity among themselves; ever since the Qin dynasty's unification of the Chinese languages, Chinese people have had a pretty strong sense of nationalism.
Or perhaps it's because foreigners have tend to lump the whole thing into a single big pot called "Chinese," as a consequence of their unwillingness to deal with the complexity of the situation. Foreigners seem to have the same project in mind, just for different purposes; an awful lot of Westerners want to prove that Chinese people are somehow different in order to show how bad they all are. Whichever way you go, there's a lot of racism and messy ideologies splattered all over the idea of Chinese being a single language.
In any case, trust me: "Chinese" is a misnomer.
There's a lot of information about Chinese languages available out there, and a bit available in here, as well. Without further ado, let me introduce some of it.
Teaching English here
This is mainly just an excuse to link to my page about teaching English in Taiwan.
News about East Asia
When I lived in Taiwan, I usually didn't care too much about the news. The stories are all basically the same -- roughly 50% government scandals, 20% general accusations, 10% police crackdowns (which are almost always only for a duration of about two days), 10% coverage of mainland China and 10% other stuff. Predicting the news in Taiwan is not hard at all. The main reason I read the news was to see what was going on elsewhere.
But now that I'm back in the States, I won't be able to get any real news about Taiwan at all. (Maybe one small story a week in the local paper, if I'm lucky.) So, without further ado, I'll list some places to find news about East Asia. Note that most of these sites are just the web presences of real-world newspapers. Few other sites seem to stay around long enough to be worth indexing.
Sites in English
Sites in Pseudo-English
The three main English newspapers in Taiwan, the Taipei Times, China Post and Taiwan News, are all in my experience pretty terrible. Their news are typically just copied and (badly) translated from other newspapers -- meaning that they're all about 24 hours late -- and their English is frequently unreliable. Many times, my students came to me holding one of the local rags, and asked "Why can you say this in English? I thought this grammar was supposed to be wrong." Invariably, the student was right; the newspaper's English was in fact wrong. And don't even get me started about their transliterations. So, read them if there's no other choice, but if you can, stick to reading the Chinese-language papers.
Sites in Chinese (Mandarin)
Chinese texts
There are a bunch of good places to get famous texts in Chinese on the web. With so many of them thoroughly out of copyright (many written even before the concept of copyright existed), it's possible to put entire texts on the web. One of my favorite places to find such texts is the Chinese Text Project, which contains many important works of history, language and philosophy, often with fairly good translations (though that largely means translations that are out of copyright, which can mean they aren't up to date with current scholarship). Some examples:
- The 莊子 Zhuangzi, easily my favorite work of Chinese philosophy. It's by turns hilarious and profound. It discusses the limitations of language and human comprehension with deep insight; it is one of the most insightful texts around.
The 道德經 Daode Jing of Laozi, usually considered the most influential work of Daoist philosophy. It deals with issues similar to those in the Zhuangzi, but often in more political ways, and with a lot less explanation.
The Daode Jing ('Classic of the Way and Virtue') is one of the most frequently re-translated works of Chinese philosophy, partly because its barebones text leaves a lot of things unexplained. This can make translations, and even discussions, of the Daode Jing hazardous -- different readers and translators interpret it, often in diametrically different ways, according to their own perspectives. So reading it, whether in translation or in the original, calls for a great deal of care and respect.
- The 論語 Analects of Confucius, one of the most influential works of ethics and belief in China.
- The 孟子 Mencius, easily the second-most influential Confucian (if that is a term we can use). The Mencius is to the Analects as the Zhuangzi is to the Daode Jing, in many ways; where Confucius gives us spare aphorisms, Mencius dives into explanations and reasoning. Confucius tells us, for example, that people are by nature good yet needing of improvement; Mencius goes into why this is so, providing logic and proof for the assertion.
- 朱子語類 Commentaries of Zhu Xi, Categorized, part of which I used in my MA. Zhu Xi is the main architect of Neo-Confucianism; his commentaries on the Analects, Mencius and other important Confucian texts became the canon in later China.
- 紅樓夢 Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the four classics of Chinese literature.
- 西遊記 Journey to the West, one of the other four classics; our source for the Monkey King, beloved of children and adults alike.
- The 康熙字典 Kangxi Dictionary, easily the single most influential dictionary of Chinese.
Really, there are just a lot of great works available at the Chinese Text Project. Go check it out. (And hopefully it won't disappear before the next time I update this page!)
And finally, another note about orientalism. Philosophy and ancient texts are one of the areas that seem to attract the most orientalism in East Asian Studies. All of Westerners' ideas about the 'mystical, exotic East' come creeping out of the woodwork when you start talking about the Daode Jing or the Analects. How to combat that?
Orientalism is very pernicious; it requires constant vigilance to even do a moderately good job of avoiding it. Even in the 21st century, as well connected as we are, there's a constant pressure to see people and cultures across the Pacific as 'weird' or somehow impossible to understand. In my own effort to resist orientalism, I just remind myself that even really cool texts like the Zhuangzi aren't perfect, nor are they 'inscrutable', nor are they fundamentally different from texts from European cultures or Meso-American cultures or wherever else. I try to maintain a critical eye about my understanding of a book, or any cultural phenomenon: how much am I allowing my own perspective to warp its intent? How much is my understanding being limited by the angle I'm coming at it from?
That's one of the reasons I like the Zhuangzi so much: it deals very directly with the limits of human knowledge, and how much our perspective on things tends to warp our understanding. It does a great job of reminding us that, if we find ourselves sure that something is wrong or weird, we are almost certainly wrong, and there's almost certainly a lot more to understand.
East Asian art
One of my true loves about East Asia is some of the art which is produced there. My favorites are the landscape paintings of Song-dynasty China, the woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Buddhist images. I'm also very interested in East Asian temple architecture, and in lots of other things in general.
Some good places to look for East Asian art on the Web are:
East Asian WWW and computer info
A decade ago, when I first wrote this section, handling of East Asian scripts was difficult. Nowadays, most computers display 漢字、汉字、ひらがな、カタカナ、한글 and other scripts pretty easily. (If your browser shows that list as boxes or mojibake, it's possible you need to set this page to display in the correct encoding. It should be in UTF-8.)
Chinese input
I'll divide this section by operating system, since the procedures are so different.
Windows
However, if you actually want to input non-latin scripts, that may take a little more work. I only know anything useful about Chinese, so that's what I'll restrict my discussion to here. On Windows, there are lots of good pages explaining how to get Chinese input working under Windows. In my experience, this often requires access to the Windows install discs.
Mac
Getting Chinese working on a Mac is quite easy; it usually seems to be pre-installed, and is largely just a matter of turning input on. Still, the page [chinese mac] is super-helpful here. Also, if you're looking for an especially good Chinese input method on Mac, I recommend QIM (aka IMKQIM); it does Intelligent Pinyin input very well. And if you want to do pinyin with tones, so that you can shūrù Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, I recommend biaoyin. (It's not quite as intuitive as it could be -- it requires way too many keystrokes, for example -- but it's still a lot faster than trying to input pinyin by hunting through the special characters menu or whatever.)
Linux
First off, see my Linux page for lots of general information about Linux, including pretty extensive notes on how to get Chinese input running.
Like most things in Linux, Chinese input is somewhat unfinished, completely free and (depending on your distribution) quite easy to install. The main IME is IBus, which derives from the older app SCIM. IBus is generally pretty great: the main Pinyin module learns Chinese phrases easily (so, for example, you can input your name and then use an abbreviation for it later on), and it changes phrases' positions in the candidate list depending on how frequently you use them. The Pinyin with tones module is the best one around; typing 'pīnyīn' just requires inputting 'pin1yin1' with no additional strokes, easily the fastest it could be. However, IBus has its problems. Doing Traditional input using Pinyin tends not to learn certain phrases, and some commonly simplified characters (台、里 and no doubt others I'm forgetting) are completely unavailable in Traditional mode. As of January, 2016, I'm using the Rime 中州韻 input method within IBus to do traditional Chinese. Every so often, I think about trying a different IME, such as fcitx or one of the many other engines out there. But for now, it's IBus.
If, by some chance, you're running Mandrake 9.1 and you want to get Chinese installed on your system, please see my brief howto describing the process. (Also, probably not a good idea to be running Mandrake 9.1 at this point, since it's probably pretty unsecure.)
General Chinese computing tools
Regardless of what kind of computer you're using, here are some links and tools that are generally useful:
Western attitudes towards East Asia
One last note about orientalism... When I first got into East Asian stuff, and later into real East Asian studies, I must admit that my reasoning was largely due to the "mystery" of it all. Ooh, the "exotic" "east." But as time went by, and especially once I had gone to Beijing and lived there for a while, I realized that East Asian folks are, indeed, pretty much like Western folks. They eat, they sleep, they use the restroom, they dream.
Unfortunately, altogether too many Western people still look at the "mysterious, exotic East" as somehow being in another continuum from that of normal reality. I am reminded of this every time a Western person who can pronounce Russian or French or even Polish names with ease mispronounces a Chinese or even Japanese name, and every time a Westerner nods their head in a discomprehending resignation to ignorance when they hear about some slightly different aspect of East Asian cultures. I especially see this in Westerners who think that Chinese culture consists of fortune cookies, kung fu and fat little buddhas, and worship it as such, or in malignorant people who violently resist attempts to educate them about the differences between (for example) Japanese, Korean and Chinese cultures, and insist on lumping them all together. This sort of belief -- the tendency to view the "East" as some sort of essential, mysterious, exotic whole -- is, as I've alluded to elsewhere on this page, often called Orientalism, and it is a very strong current in Western culture.
Well, hopefully I can help to put a stop to that. There are differences between, for example, Taiwanese culture and 'American' culture -- big ones -- but they very rarely lie where the stereotyping Westerner thinks. I'm not going to say for now what I think the real differences are, because as with anything so large-scale as this, it is very hard to be objective, much less concrete. It's hard to even define what we mean by 'Taiwanese culture' or 'American culture'. For now, please try to embrace a spirit of realizing that each of our perspectives is limited, and that we should all try to learn about other people, regardless of where they're from. Each of us is a real person, and each of us, regardless of where we are, has a real life.