Tales Across The Sea

I’ve found it difficult to get a handle on Chinese culture unless I bug my Chinese friends with more questions than they probably feel like answering, gracious though they invariably are. If you’re not brought up knowing about the Brotherhood of the Peach Orchard or the Monkey King, the Hungry Ghost Festival or the number of different names a Chinese person can have, it’s hard to find someone with the English and the patience to explain this stuff to a beginner.

So I’m extremely happy to have found a Singaporean publisher, called Asiapac, which makes it its business to explain Chinese culture to non-natives!!!!! They do lots of stuff in short graphic novel form, from summarizing 5000 years of literature to explaining why Chinese culture is so fixated on calligraphy or boys (as opposed to girls). Here are some sample titles I bought:

Adventures of The Monkey King
Romance of Three Kingdoms (in ten volumes – Zhuge Liang wears a really peculiar hat, kind of like a lotus-shaped turban)
Secrets of the Chinese Palace (horrifying)
Great Chinese Emperors
Infamous Chinese Emperors
Origins of Chinese Culture
Origins of Chinese Cuisine
Great Chinese Women
Chinese History (to 1911)
Origins of Chinese Names
and so forth.

I’ve bought a lot of these books and reread them frequently. Between that and trying a bit to learn some Mandarin I no longer feel completely lost in Chinese culture, although I’m aware that I’ve only scratched the surface. But I thought I’d let you know that there’s someone out there doing their best to make Chinese culture less mysterious to those who start out completely ignorant. I am very grateful to them.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 1:38 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.