If you're a regular consumer of Taiwanese news media, you've probably noticed how they cannot run a weather story without featuring photos creepily focused on some young woman just walking down the street in the sun or rain.
I guess they're just using AI for that now, and it's still creepy as hell.
#8: Kokuho 國寶
A sweeping, decades-long historical drama following the son of a slain Yakuza boss turned kabuki actor and his journey from industry outsider to “national treasure”. A compelling plot with strong characters and impeccable acting, cinematography, makeup and costuming. Absolute cinema.
#7: Palimpsest: The Story of a Name
Hong Kong director Mary Stephen investigates the convoluted and murky origins of her very English surname, using the journey to explore the histories of 20th-century HK and China, her family's migration story, and the narratives we make up. Excellent documentary.
#12: 海洋台灣歷史論集 by 戴寶村
A heavy tome coming in at nearly 500 pages, this book covers a lot of what I felt was missing from the author’s slimmer 台灣的海洋歷史文化，which I read last year. As a collection of his academic papers, though, it’s wide-ranging almost to a fault, and often reads as long-winded and dry.
10 million people died in the KMT-CCP civil war
It can be deeply frustrating, as a journalist, when you get ghosted — but this is obviously not the way to deal with it! I can only speak for myself as a nobody, but my takeaway from this is not "better get back to them" but "have absolutely nothing to do with this journalist/publication in future."
Not sure if this reeks more of desperation or petty vindictiveness — a way of threatening sought-after interviewees that, if they don't respond to the magazine's questions, they'll just print AI-generated answers instead. Either way, it reeks.
Editorial standards were not met
Esquire Singapore couldn't land an interview with Mackenyu, so they decided to just run an AI-generated "conversation" with the One Piece star instead.
It's as dumb and unethical as it sounds, but I was not prepared for how pretentious it is. They're acting like this is experimental art. It's slop.
#11: When Sleeping Women Wake by Emma Pei Yin
Not a bad debut novel. The author shows talent in places and definitely has potential. In this historical novel set in WWII-era HK, though, I was too often taken out by the bad history and bad Cantonese, and disappointed by weak sense of time and place.
The best word for this type of content is, as I believe Jake Eberts first put it, “phrenology for words”
The HK Story exhibition at the History Museum reopens today after more than 5 years. In one of many rewritten sections, the 1967 riots — when children were killed by Communist bombs — are celebrated as “anti-British resistance.”
Meanwhile, the 2019 protests are the worst tragedy ever to befall HK.
Dominic Lee
Fact-checking pro-Beijing lawmaker Dominic Lee after he slams West, defends security law in viral UN speech
🔗 buff.ly/fCESpaq
State media behaviour
Yup re Dominic Lee.
#6: One Piece S2
The second season of Netflix’s surprise success live action adaptation is back, having clearly earned a far bigger budget. Technically superior in every regard to the first season, my primary concern is just how far in the story they will ever get at this much more deliberate pace.
#10: Houseboat Days in China by J. O. P. Bland
The Customs official cum journalist’s account of hunting trips upriver from Shanghai is sometimes a difficult read — both because of its prose and troubling tone towards China and its people. For the sane reason, it’s also a vivid portrait of the time.
𝐍𝐄𝐖 @asiancha.bsky.social—Ryan Ho Kilpatrick on 𝑅𝑒𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑇𝑎𝑖𝑤𝑎𝑛, which interrogates Taiwan’s asserted maritime identity: "... a volume refreshingly unafraid to confront the contradictions... underpinning Taiwan’s relatively new-found maritime identity."
⧉ 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃: chajournal.com/2026/03/16/i...
The brain-deadness of posting that from TST, of all places
#9: Reorienting Taiwan: Ocean, Selfhood and the Pacific edited by Niki JP Alsford and Ti-Han Chang
A fascinating and very readable collection of research on Taiwan’s emergent maritime identity. A refreshingly honest look at an often politicised topic. Read my full review for @asiancha.bsky.social ⬇️
𝐍𝐄𝐖 @asiancha.bsky.social—Ryan Ho Kilpatrick on 𝑅𝑒𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑇𝑎𝑖𝑤𝑎𝑛, which interrogates Taiwan’s asserted maritime identity: "... a volume refreshingly unafraid to confront the contradictions... underpinning Taiwan’s relatively new-found maritime identity."
⧉ 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃: chajournal.com/2026/03/16/i...
Time traveler from the Thirteen Factories, 520%
“Through these legislative amendments, we hope to eliminate the inadequacies or
plug those loopholes, so that Hong Kong will not become a haven for fugitives.”
- Carrie Lam, 2019
I wrote the script for this doc on the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. Doing so was a challenge: my priority is always to pay tribute to the ships I write about and their crews, but the 活該 element can't be overlooked — this tragedy was a direct consequence of the hell America was visiting daily on Vietnam
Admittedly, Eurasians also buy into this when it suits. I also grew up on self-congratulatory comments about how we're better-looking and smarter than gweilos and Chinese. But honestly, this is also just cope. It's people who feel rejected by both groups saying nah, we were too good for them anyway.
The attitude persists to this day. I remember being very weirded out the first time I encountered it in the wild. Then, as now, it's pure cope to deal with a civilizational challenge: a way for people used to thinking they were the master race to accept that they are still *one of* the master races.
The most immediate analogue I can think of, as with so many things in the US nowadays, is with mainland China. Early modernisers like Liang Qichao believed that "yellow-white intermarriage" (黄白通婚) would produce a global master race to rule over the supposedly inferior black, brown, and "red" races.
American discourse on "Wasians" is so gross and weird.
It really makes me appreciate how utterly unremarkable being Eurasian is here in Hong Kong, where families like mine have been mixed for generations, and we know way more Eurasian slackers and normies (like me, in fairness) than “Übermenschen.”
"The low level of reported sexual assaults in Hong Kong raises questions about how confident women are to report."