Word: jin
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...Jin, whose prose is as economical as his name, left his native China in 1985 to study English literature at Brandeis University. He rose to prominence in 1999 when his second novel, Waiting, won the National Book Award in the U.S., a first for a Chinese writer. The tale of a two-decade-delayed love affair between a married doctor and a nurse in a China slouching toward modernity, Waiting established Jin as the poet of dreams deferred. His follow up novel, The Crazed, is stylistically similar, but this time Jin has made his politics more explicit...
...Crazed is narrated by Jian Wan, a literature grad student whose transformation is at the center of the novel. Rational to the point of detachment, yet endowed with the seeds of a turbulent inner life, he's an ideal if slightly tiresome mouthpiece for Jin's realist voice. When his mentor, Professor Yang, suffers an "unsettling" stroke, Jian dutifully cares for him but worries that the job will interfere with his upcoming exams. Unlike his passionate professor, who suffered in the Cultural Revolution for declaring that Goethe was a great poet, Jian barely cares for literature, studying only...
...South Korea's red-hot movie industry, one of the many bedroom scenes in Too Young to Die was a tad risqu?. A woman fondles a man and bends over him, initiating oral sex. After banning the movie, Korea's censors relented last month on the condition director Park Jin Pyo obscure the scene by digitally turning down the lights. It wasn't the act that scandalized Koreans, it was the actors. The stars of the movie are in their 70s, and in conservative Korea, nobody was ready to witness granny and grandpa having a romp. Koreans typically shunt...
...remains the enemy, viewed as the unrepentant instigator of the Korean War. Walking along the banks of the Taedong, I stopped to chat with a university student studying a computer science text on a park bench. Wearing a Kim Il Sung pin on his shirt, Son Song Jin said he liked basketball, so I asked him about his favorite stars. Had he heard of Michael Jordan? He looked perplexed. No, he hadn't. So what did he think of America? Pyongyang was destroyed by American warplanes during the Korean War, he told me, and he'd heard stories about Americans...
...vendors go all night long. If you get the munchies at 2 a.m., make your way to Yanggong Jin (Yanggong Alley), a narrow lane lined with crayfish restaurants. You'll know you're there when you see the bright red shells littering the curb all the way down the street...