Facing the Buddha
By Beaton Galafa Hangzhou was my first city to visit since I arrived in Zhejiang in mid-September, spending all my days within Jinhua. I had missed a trip to Yiwu earlier out of paranoia. They had mentioned big companies and industries, and I abhor feeding egos of governments that want to parade civilization in front of…
The Sound of the Sea
by Danton Remoto “This is the last time you’ll see the sea in our country,” his father told Cody as they walked on the milky-white sand in Bacacay. Cody noticed the sand grains beginning to cling to his toes. He looked up. The sun was already high above the coconut trees. His ears were…
Italo Calvino and Learning from Experimental Fiction
Recently, my students at the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong Joint Institute are reading and studying the style of Italo Calvino in his Invisible Cities, and to say the least, they find it frustrating. This book, like many of his books, is hard to categorize and fails to be a novel in any traditional sense of…
Aaron Sorkin and Writing Smart
As I watch more and more movies, I think we expect less out of our movies. As Marvel has established the perfect formula for blockbusters, movie goers appear happy to keep spending their money to see similar stories again and again. For example, think of how close Dr. Strange is with Iron Man. Close to…
A Start
Dear Writers and Readers, This new online literary journal, The Blue Tiger Review, is being started during the summer of 2018. This journal started out of a basic need: exceptional writers were being blocked from finding the audiences that they deserved. During my summer creative writing class, my second language writers were producing work that…