Taiwan’s booth at the just-
concluded Los Angeles Times Festival of Books drew a lot of attention from visitors across the US, many of whom were eager to resume traveling after the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tourism Bureau’s Los Angeles office said.
As one of the nation’s largest literary events, the annual festival at the University of Southern California usually attracts about 150,000 people every April.
Photo: CNA
This year, it was held on Saturday and Sunday last week, featuring hundreds of exhibitors who filled the university campus.
Due to the pandemic, the event was held virtually in the past two years.
While the bureau usually runs a booth at the book festival to promote Taiwan tourism, for this year’s festival, the bureau’s Los Angeles office teamed up with the Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, the Culture Center of Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles and the Taiwan Centers for Mandarin Learning.
Shih Chao-hui (施照輝), head of the bureau’s Los Angeles office, said this year’s festival showcased books and publications covering a wide range of areas, including travel and tourism, gardening, and delicacies.
As the spread of COVID-19 slows in the US, many Americans are eager to resume international travel, he said.
Several US exhibitors from the tourism industry also promoted tailored travel itineraries, and expressed hope that Taiwan would open its border to international travelers, Shih said.
Centered around the theme “Literature and Migration: Flowing Across Words,” the Taiwan booth showcased the English versions of Taiwanese literary works such as The Stolen Bicycle (單車失竊記) by Wu Ming-yi (吳明益), as well as Running Mother (奔跑的母親) and Sailing to Formosa: A Poetic Companion to Taiwan (航向福爾摩莎:詩想台灣) by Guo Song-fen (郭松棻).
Many visitors to the booth had either been to Taiwan or an interest in Asian cultures, Taiwan Academy head Chien Teh-yuan (簡德源) said.
Chien said he used a whale design representing the shape of Taiwan to highlight the characteristics of the country’s literary works and its landscape to reflect the vividness and fantasy of Taiwanese literature.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater