Irene Eng The Kibbitzer

Straddle on both worlds - US and China – finding Chinese-American authors are not easy since I do not know how they spell their names in English: if they’ve taken a Christian name or just translation of Chinese. If it’s just translation, would they spell it as pinyin (which is very unlikely) or Wade-Giles, and [...]

Marguerite Duras’s The Loverwas based on her own story, even the muddy Mekong River suddenly became romantic.  My favored actor Tony Leung 梁家辉 vividly played the leading man, a husky voiced woman narrated (was it Duras herself?), sad but memorable and enjoyable.

What makes a great lover, imho … is the one who’s true and decent to the end.  Can’t [...]

Tonight was Kinglazy’s spring concert.  His band (he plays percussion) played Flight of the Thunderbird by Saucedo, Marriage of Figaro Overture by the little known composer Mozart - they did great, and Radetzky March by dad, J. Strauss Sr.  They were the 4th group which’s the last, by then the audience was hot and clapping wildly as the music [...]

Tags: Melody

I learned Shiing-Shen Chern  陈省身 (1911 - 2004, Jiaxing 嘉兴 Zhejiang province - Tianjin) from the memorial he wrote for Weiliang.  They were close friends, roommated at the University of Hamburg in 1934.  “Weiliang’s an owl, sleep till 2 or 3pm … but the German banks close at 1pm, so every time he needed money, it’s me to get it for [...]

Chou recounted in his book when he visited him in 1982 back here in Harvard, Fairbank treated him well, didn’t mind his absurd accusation.  Fairbank knew China well.  He went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to study Brit imperial history. While there, he learned that the Qing imperial archives were being opened, hence he went to [...]

Fairbank (1907 - 1991; Huron S Dakota - Cambridge, MA) was the most prominent American scholar of East Asia in the last century, and well known in China as Fei Zhengqing.  He graduated from Harvard and went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.  He founded the East Asia center for research which was later named the [...]

Five leather-bound books, Reagan’s diaries during his presidency are being published for the first time this month by HarperCollins, which I believe still an American company. Few years ago I found a gigantic set of books sat on the simple and crude St. Johns’ library (sorry for saying so, but compare to NY Public Library, [...]