alan DAI
@dai_alan_dai
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student of history, literature, language … committed dilettante … he/him
Los Angeles, CA
Joined April 2017
I could write The Phenomenology of Spirit.
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@emi_f1sher NARDWUAR: youre martin luther! of course we had to get the door.MARTIN LUTHER: Wait is this a gift? can i keep—.NARDWUAR: (takes back the door).
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recently discovered by the FBI in a massachusetts attic: 17th+18th century artifacts from the ryukyu kingdom, including pottery, painted scrolls, and a hand-drawn map of the kingdom, all presumed to have been destroyed 70+ years ago during the battle of okinawa
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a selection of “handy” insults from a korean manual of spoken chinese, 1816
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1000-page east asian history textbook from the ‘70s with wonderful figures/illustrations of east asian writing systems
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@_DMR @emi_f1sher yea but sometimes he whips out some incredibly rare memoriabilia and is like “remember this?” and then has to explain he borrowed it and can’t give it to the musician 😭.
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@MadocCairns one of the japanese students sent to study in europe (either germany or england) during the meiji period did basically the same thing.
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@yiqinfu wow! funnily enough the design reminds me of older japanese timelines of east asian history
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near Ongcheon-ri, Andong, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea (2007)
This is neat - these things (they're deities protecting the entrance to a village) go all the way back to the warring states era and possibly further. I once posted some from the Han dynasty a while back which I now can't find, and they're mentioned in the Stratagems.
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i only have one funny meme format to post and ill keep posting it till i die or this site does, whichever come first
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also, saw (one of?) the first books printed with moveable metal type in korea. this beauty is from the 1400s!!
in independent study/directed readings today i literally played a game of judging books by their covers—looking at the covers of a bunch of early modern east asian books and guessing whether they were chinese japanese or korean … SO FUN.
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they were handed over to the japanese government a few days ago
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why am i just finding out that the WBO interim heavyweight champ is a 40 yr old chinese man who looks like a ripped bao’an
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驢養的 “offspring of an ass” is a favorite of mine… it’s also cool how many of these survive in modern day mandarin.
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this video blows my mind every time I watch it
@darkblackcoffee It's because of the Yellow River's repeated course changes - whenever it flows out into the Bohai sea it creates more land up there via silt deposits.
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@toomuchistrue how did i become a maoist? well, after disney bought star wars and changed the canon it was inevitable.
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a little thread of some meals I made in June 😁 zaru soba (chilled noodles with dipping sauce) and summer salad
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ah yes, my two favorite pioneers of the asian american movement, awkwafina and ken jeong
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17th century letter from hokkien merchants in taiwan to their brother in batavia (today jakarta), sent via dutch ship
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“the people’s paper” 老百姓报, a wall newspaper in yan’an, june 1937 — note that it is written with latinxua sin wenz, a romanization system developed by chinese and soviet sinologists during the early 1930s that did not mark tones and used a lot of fun x’s and z’s
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As also a Japanese student whose first lang is Chinese, I love how she sees kanji & kana: 日文文字夾雜漢字與假名,密度不均看來像是某種斑點花紋,這就有一種美感,彷彿是漢字的寶石鑲嵌在平假名的大海裡,或是漢字的花瓣點綴在平假名的樹梢上,當月光照下,大海便閃閃發亮,風一吹過,櫻瓣便紛紛飄落。
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@egasmb awesome thread as always — one tidbit to add, in toisanese/hoisan-wa, personal pronouns are plural-ized by changing the tone, instead of adding a plural marker! im far from an expert (hence the wiki screenshot) but this seems pretty unique among sinitic topolects to me
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tina fei, renowned chinese american actress, comedian, and writer
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my first-ever published short story is out now!! in @sinethetamag issue 22!! along with much more amazing writing+art from my cocontributors!! ty to the whole editorial team@sinΘ!!.
Alan Dai @dai_alan_dai's short story, “Snake Huntin’ is Serious Business”, is a hallucinatory, surreal read on sleep deprivation and prescription medicine.
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@left_plain it’s so crazy cuz he just look like my uncle if he hit the gym 😭 his catchphrase is “chinese power”
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randomly walked into this place like a year ago and had one of the best chinese meals ive ever had in the US.
me: there is nothing redeemable about San Francisco. I’m doom loop pilled. I can get everything I need in east bay anyways. one meal at Old Mandarin Islamic Restaurant at Outer Sunset: you don’t get to hate it unless you love it. our splendid city on shining hills. our Baghdad by
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a little less than 3 days left and im still outlining and fiddling with pdfs ✋😔 and i have to do the rest of my phd apps ✋😔 i give up ✋😔 it’s not my fate
wow im so behind on my thesis 🤦♂️.
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obvious this 1950s jello ad is outta pocket etc etc but im just impressed at the animation … from “十樣蔗露” (“ten varieties of Jello”) to “JELLO” in chop suey font
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always hated how bashing panda express and other canto-american cuisine seemed to be so central to the cultural identity of so many chinese american children of hart-celler. gatekeeping culinary “authenticity” seems to be the end-all-be-all.
I'm tired of how slamming Anglo-Cantonese cuisine has become cool when talking about newer, trendier and undiscovered regional Chinese food. No need to compare or shit on the people who own and work in takeaways/restaurants that have made Chinese food in the UK what it is today
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american soldiers captured in korea formed their own branches of the KKK in POW camps , which the US military later described as a model, “rational” way to resist communist indoctrination
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japanese teacher said i couldn’t do my japanese culture presentation on kanshi so im gonna do it on japanese war crimes denialism instead.
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@left_plain there was a prof of korean history from SK who i recently saw give a talk and when he was talking about the duration/distance of premodern korean sailors+traders he was like “i know it took this long because i sailed these routes on a reconstructed version of the boats they had”.
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same bookstore had a chinese translation of infinite jest sitting next to the wandering earth
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finally watched tbis movie like a week ago and it was mid ?? or am i uncultured.
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ran into a nice old man at the eye doctor’s who had a duck in a stroller and was quacking back and forth with it.
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i like to imagine them trying to talk in mandarin, ho in a thick vietnamese/yunnanese/cantonese accent and kim in pure dongbei.
Ho Chi Minh & Kim Il Sung during Kim’s visit to Hanoi, Vietnam. Historic 🇻🇳🇰🇵.(1964)
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posting some used bookstore hauls from the past couple months to keep myself accountable about not buying books until i have time to read
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@oldking420 yess i have a lil collection of litty laowai chinese that im always looking for excuses to post
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@left_plain this is how i think scholars will view the breakfast club interview with birdman in 30–50 yrs.
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“spidermanchu: duanfang as networker and spindoctor” remains my favorite dissertation title of all time
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even the debate abt how disappointing asian americans are is disappointing.
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@tianyuf bro saw the opening scene of the netflix 3BP adaptation and immediately opened twitter.
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when every member of the open-air kitchen staff is chain smoking you know the food is gonna HIT (all this food + extra portions for takeout was 30 rmb …)
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when life gives you leftover homemade beef+tofu+vermicelli baozi you fry the shit out of them and throw some scallions and sesame seeds on top
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this scanner is so cool. the LoC asian reading room has a german scanner with a “remove thumb” option.
How the Internet Archive digitizes each book page by page
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thanks to the whole @sinethetamag team for believing in my work 🥺.
We're thrilled to announce that our nominees for the PEN/Robert J. Dau. Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers 2023 (@PENamerica) are: Alan Dai @dai_alan_dai, T. Y. Christiansen, Katie Hwang, and Danielle Shi!. To our nominees, thank you for trusting sinθ with your work💕
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the tiktok handle is ccp_8964 lmfao.
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oxford friends and mutuals: come watch me present some of my MA thesis at @OxfordTGHS’s annual conference on tuesday! you can hear me ramble abt the bilingual newspaper this handsome group of fellows created during WWII 😁
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me: wait chinese ppl eat rabbit ?.mom: ya.me: wait so how do they cook it.mom: soy sauce braise, what else.
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in my tall veggie era, chopsticks for scale .(i can’t believe i lugged this whole daikon home just for it to be rotten.)
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my mother brings a big peanut butter and jelly and arugula and fried egg and sriracha sandwich to work every day
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starting a thread of all the (used, hopefully) books i buy this summer to keep myself accountable. 5 quid (🥸) for these 2
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LMAOO i just got interviewed for one of those “for a dollar” tiktokers … they asked me if i knew what “MBA” stands for.
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Anjirō, first (recorded) Japanese Christian: murderer, interpreter, and pirate!
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wechat’s speech recognition is now at the level of understanding ABC chinglish LOL
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sitting in a university library listening to two students working on their math proofs by debating the differences between the answers given by chatGPT and google bard . who said hermeneutics is dead?.
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latinxua is notable for being the first romanization system adopted (in any widespread manner) by native chinese speakers as a replacement for hanzi
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