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SATYA: A Prayer for the Enemy
Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy has won a number of Best Film festival awards in the United States and Europe in youth, education, and documentary film categories. Why is no surprise. This video is a gem and well worth purchasing for film libraries. It packs a direct
moral punch, and an instructive one as well, without being strident or self-righteous about incontestable human rights violations or cultural genocide....
The Making of Modern Tibet (Revised Edition)
For those who like their enemies pure and their heroes appropriately sainted, A. Tom Grunfeld’s revised The Making of Modern Tibet will probably disappoint. Though Grunfeld has taken on a subject that has been almost completely polarized by the one-sided imagery projected by either the Chinese government or the Tibetan exile community and its many Western supporters, Professor Grunfeld has not chosen sides. Rather, Grunfeld has worked diligently to offer as balanced a treatment as possible, an...
Choice for a Chinese Woman: Enlightenment in a Buddhist Convent
A mong the few videos concerning Chinese religions is this 1993 German production. But rather than illustrate Chinese Buddhism, it provides a muddled and biased depiction of events in the life of one thirteen-yearold girl, and attempts, unsuccessfully, to convince us that
such girls enter convents only when driven to do so by intolerable social oppression....
EAA Interview, Feature Article
INTEGRATING ASIA INTO WORLD HISTORY: Perspectives from Three Pre-college Teachers
World history is increasingly being included in numerous state and district curriculum standards. The EAA guest editors invited three teachers to discuss their experiences and insights on how best to integrate Asia in a world history course. Alison Kaminsky, who holds a master’s degree in Asian Studies, teaches at a middle school in Long Beach, California and is also a mentor teacher in her district. Her school follows the California frameworks where world history is taught in the sixth, seven...
Transnational Chinese Cinemas Identity, Nationhood, Gender
Although this is not the only recent book which uses Chinese new cinema to analyze Chinese identity and politics, it is still a useful contribution to the limited literature in this field. A collection of fifteen loosely connected essays which are of various levels of theoretical sophistication and academic quality, this volume can serve as a reference book to academics. It can also be used as supplementary materials for undergraduate film teaching. The book is divided into three parts which dea...
Eternal Seed (Amrit Beeja)
Eternal Seed depicts the agricultural practices and rituals of three women, Yashodha, Nilamma, and Sunanda, in an unidentified part of rural India. The women explain in a number of interview scenes how and why they want to preserve traditional crop varieties against the inroads of multinational agribusiness. Our view of their world is intercut several times with scenes from commercial greenhouses, agricultural labs, milking machines, artificial insemination stations, mechanized food processing, ...
Japan Why It Works, Why It Doesn’t: Economics in Everyday Life
Japan: Why It Works, Why It Doesn’t evolved out of a 1995 visit to Japan by American economics professors James Mak and Shyam Sunder. Arriving in Japan with little understanding of the society, Mak and Sunder began asking questions of their Kobe University hosts (including their co-editors, Shigeyuki Abe and Kazuhiro Igawa) about what they saw around them. Many of these questions became the titles of the various essays that make up the book. By focusing on everyday life, the book explains some...
Through Chinese Women’s Eyes
Through Chinese Women’s Eyes was filmed in Shanghai and Beijing by Dr. Mayfair Yang, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This film looks closely at the contrast between Maoist and post-Maoist China through the words and experiences of female factory workers, office personnel, academics, entrepreneurs, and women employed in new categories of service work like today’s popular “hospitality girls.” Using a seamless integration of narration, interviews,...
A Guide to Chinese Literature
Originally written as a series of lectures, Professor Wilt Idema published a version of this book in Dutch in 1985, and Lloyd Haft translated it into English. The present edition, coauthored by Idema and Haft, is an extensively revised and expanded version of the earlier one bringing the discussion of modern Chinese literature up into the early 1990s. As might be expected in any work endeavoring to address 3,000 years of Chinese literature in 300 pages and 28 chapters, much of the Guide reads li...
Rose, Rose, I Love You
Wang Chen-Ho (1940–1990) was one of Taiwan’s leading authors of popular fiction and was also known as one of the most prolific writers of satire of his time. Considered to be a part of the “back to the roots” movement of the 1960s and 70s, Wang’s popularity stemmed from his ability to intricately weave vernacular dialogue into his writings, creating prose recognizable and accessible to a wide variety of people. His razor wit and keen eye for irony in everyday life in Taiwan make his wr...
Web Gleanings: Asia in World History
JAPAN
TITLE: JAPANESE HISTORY
URL: http://www.variable.net/ hidden/japan/ introduction.html
Although this site is a “demo” for a course, this scaled-down version could prove to be very useful for pre-college students. The multimedia approach has great appeal; in addition to pictorial representations, there are audio and video clips. The material is arranged via a timeline.
TITLE: ANCIENT JAPAN
URL: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/ANCJAPAN/CONTENTS.HTM
A view of the major events and cu...
Japan 2000: Against All the Odds, The High-Tech Road, Changing Lifestyles, The Future in the Countryside
The Japan 2000 series provides an overview to the lives and goals of Japan’s people, and is interesting in that it does not focus on the Tokyo region (the Kanto Plain), as many such instructional series do. Instead, emphasis is placed on Western Japan, the region known as Kansai. In this shift of focus, the views which many ascribe to the Kanto region are seen to have broader application. This series presents a variety of topics, and offers the Western viewer an explanation of Japanese actions...
Walking with Buddha
Walking with Buddha, another film in the Maryknoll series on Asian religions, presents a brief overview of Buddhism in modern-day Thailand. Like the similar film on Buddhism in Japan, Buddhism and Black Belts, this film seeks to promote interreligious understanding and mutual respect by highlighting what is most distinctive and most admirable in the Buddhism of a particular culture....
Columns, Curriculum Materials Review
Asian Culture in the Classroom
I teach a senior elective in Asian Studies at Westridge School, an independent school in Pasadena, California. My objective is to provide a solid foundation for appreciating the distinctive histories and cultures of China, Japan and Korea, their interrelationships and commonalities. To secure respect for Asian societies, opportunities are created for students to experience the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures within and outside of the classroom (see appendix 1). In order to be as creative ...
The Gingko Bed
Interweaving mythic and supernatural elements, writer/director Jacky (Jekyu) Kang’s The Gingko Bed dramatizes the tale of doomed lovers whose souls have transmigrated to, and remain trapped for over 1,000 years in, the expertly hand-carved wood of a gingko bed. The film proper begins in contemporary Seoul as 32-year-old college art instructor Su-hyun takes possession of the antique bed, oblivious to its tragic history, even as he reignites its drama. Soon beset with baffling impulses, hallucin...
Columns, Curriculum Materials Review
Cobblestone’s Elementary School Magazines on Asia
It can be quite a challenge for elementary teachers to find appropriate materials for their students in the field of Asian studies. Information must be presented through a suitable reading level in a format interesting to students, and still provide accurate facts in a culturally sensitive manner. Finding resources that offer a balance between activity oriented ideas and accurate information can be difficult. Too many times we get stuck into making “cute”things, and run the risk of perpetuat...
Dear Alice: Letters Home from American Teachers Learning to Live in China
Earl Herbert Cressy recalled his pre-World War I East Asian sojourn in the following terms: “He had come to the Far East with a message that he was on fire to give, but in the process of transmission the East had spoken its message to him. He had gone out to change the East and was returning himself a changed man . . . not only a missionary but an internationalist, an intermediary between the two great civilizations that inhabit the earth.”1...
Columns, Curriculum Materials Review
The China Box and China Talk
Teachers who travel often wonder what they can bring back to benefit their students that will not cost much and be easy to carry—the China Box seems at first glance like just such a collection acquired on some lucky teacher’s travels. Here are maps and books and small toys—and slides, of course, and chopsticks, and more. Oh, that we all should be so lucky! Tucked in the bottom of the box is China Talk: A Handbook for Teachers, Librarians, and Parents by Steven I. Levine. The handbook turns...
Asia in World History
One of the most problematic geographical terms in the world historian’s vocabulary is Asia. Greek mariners originally employed the term Asia to refer to lands east of the Aegean Sea, as opposed to Europe, the lands to the west. To scholars of medieval Europe, Asia referred generically to an amorphous and poorly known land east of the Nile River and the Mediterranean Sea. Meanwhile, in the lands now collectively and conventionally known as Asia, no one used the term Asia at all before about the...
New to EAA?
Before viewing the full archives, view Editor’s Choice Articles, handpicked by EAA Editor, Lucien Ellington, which provide a good overview of EAA and introduction for new readers.
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