If there's one thing you should know about Lung Ying-tai, the new culture chief for the Taipei City Government, it's this: her 1985 book Wildfire went back to press 164 times in 19 years. That's a lot of reprints!
According to Mary Ma at Prophet Press, a subsidiary firm of Yen Shuan Publishing, which first published Lung in the mid-1980s, there are anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 copies of Wildfire in print, a huge figure for any bestseller in Taiwan.
Ma said Wildfire was especially well-received in China in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where many intellectuals felt Lung was talking to them as well.
Lung, 47, is married to Berndt Walter, a Swiss economist who works in the banking industry. The two have been living in Germany for the past 14 years and have two sons, 14 and 10.
While Wildfire is technically out of print, Yen Shuan still has copies warehoused and is now distributing old copies to bookstores around the island. Lung's new book of essays, Reflections on a Century (cover art, above) is quickly shooting up the bestseller list and is selling out store by store.
Turn to page 21 to read Joyce Yen's feature story about Lung Ying-tai on our Sunday book page.
As China prepares for its 50th anniversary...
A reader sent us the following e-mail a few days ago:
"I received an e-mail a couple of weeks ago from a Western friend in Beijing who descibed the atmosphere there as China prepares for its 50th anniversary. He wrote:"
`All the Taiwanese Web sites are blocked, and I have to be careful when sending mail from my Chinese SMTP server with certain key words, which I purposely mis-spell. Everything is totally paranoid here for the 50th anniversary of misery. The Green Shirts now patrol our school and come into classrooms during classes, and stare suspiciously at us whiteys whenever we come in or go out at the school gates. At most apartment blocks where whites live, there's a 24-hour security guard who asks everyone for their ID. Everyone who goes in or comes out gets noted down in a little book. The implication being that we are the ones responsible for the unstable elements of Chinese society.'
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