I’ve written quite a lot on this blog about the problem with using modern Vietnamese translations of historical materials that were originally written in classical Chinese (Hán). Recently in reading…
I came across this advertisement a few years ago in a Thai newspaper from the 1930s. It shows a woman “administering help” to her child. The child is unable to…
Over three years ago I wrote a post about an advertisement I found in a newspaper from the Philippines from 1940 for “Feen-A-Mint, the tasty chewing gum laxative.” Since that…
A few days ago someone pointed out to me that a new general history called A History of the Vietnamese by Keith Taylor is now listed on Amazon, and is…
I’ve been in situations where I have been amazed at what I see as an almost encyclopedic knowledge that many Vietnamese scholars have about the work of other Vietnamese scholars.…
As is well known, during the colonial period, various European scholars came to envision a process in the past where Southeast Asia came to be influenced by outside forces. In…
The “Lush Life” is a jazz standard that was written during the 1930s. In the song, the singer expresses how tired he is of the night life. He sings about…
The period of the 1930s was a relatively calm period in Southeast Asia. There are at least a couple of reasons for why this was the case. First, many anti-colonial…
One work that I have been meaning to read for several months now is The Shadow Left Behind: A Monograph on the Painting The Mahasattva Trúc Lâm Coming Out of…
“What’s a girl to do when she has so many choices?” That’s what I think I would have thought if I had been a Chinese woman in Singapore in 1937,…