Crossing The Pond
I’m enroute to Korea on a work trip today, which either means I’ll have more interesting things to write about next week, or I’ll be struggling with spicy food and signs that look like this:
In the meantime, take a look at this blog post by spec-fic writer Aliette de Bodard, a French-Vietnamese author whose stories often deal with multicultural issues, something I don’t think we’ve talked much about here. She’s also got a lot of mouth-watering pictures of Vietnamese cuisine. Enjoy.
Interesting article! It’s sad that as soon as she mentioned most of those gaffes, even I knew they were wrong. Like the Chinese people hunting and imprisoning dragons. Even I know the Chinese revered their dragons, and that’s just from what I learned in school.
The angle about the Daoist immortals being a good thing, so a bad guy obsessed with immortality wouldn’t be frowned upon, that’s really hugely interesting. Too bad the author didn’t play with it instead of forcing the character into the tired old redemption straitjacket. Far more interesting to pose the question, can someone still be saved even after achieving immortality? And is immortality that good of a thing at all?