[continued from 88.3] The rather odd story of Western heroism in the face if the Japanese conquest of Nanking is recounted in John Rabe, the true story of the German businessman…
Years ago, when In worked as a writer with film director Denis Sanders we had a modus operandi wherein I would sit across a table from him and lecture out…
In an age in which it is possible for a drone to take out a terror suspect sitting in a public toilet in Yemen it is reasonable to wonder how…
The Enduring Revolution The essence of drama is conflict, and China’s conflicted 20th C plays out like a dysfunctional family saga compounded by uninvited foreign guests with bad personal habits:…
The benediction “may you live in interesting times” is, of course, an ironic curse. But, so also would be that one should preside over tedious times. It is one of…
The good earth of MGM’s expensive ($2.8 million) 1937 film of Pearl S. Buck’s award winning book was not of Chinese soil. Filmed entirely on a five-hundred-acre farm in Chatsworth,…
Like most Westerners of my generation the author came to know China and especially the Chinese from Western actors playing Asians in “yellowface” in The Good Earth and Charlie Chanfilms. The Chinese on…
Recently, when the accountant who prepares my tax returns remarked that I don’t really seem to be making a lot of money with royalties from my books I didn’t really…
This is hardly the first time I have engaged the subject of homosexuality in these pages, and it probably won’t be the last. [See, from the DCJ Archives Nos. 2.4,…
Since I have been unsuccessful in finding any ancient Romans to chat with I have long felt the urge to put to use those four years of Latin I slogged…