March 2022 – The Lotus

Among the many achievements that have benefited humanity, a survey from December in 2000 showed that the Japanese voted instant noodles as Japan’s greatest invention of the 20th century (BBC, 2000). The results of this survey may be unbelievable, but do you know how such a convenient and delicious food was invented? Image from Cup Noodles Museum The inventor of instant noodles, Momofuku Ando, formerly known as Go Peh-hok (吳百福), was born in Taiwan’s Kagi-chō (now Chiayi County) in 1910 during the period of Japanese occupation. He was Taiwanese Japanese. His parents died when he was young, and he was raised by his grandparents who ran a small wholesale fabric store. At the age of 22, Momofuku Ando used his father’s legacy to start his textile company, and the following year...

Image: Wikipedia A leading figure of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun was a Chinese writer, essayist, poet, and literary critic. He was highly acclaimed by the Chinese government after 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded, and Mao Zedong was a lifelong admirer of Lu Xun’s writing. According to Lu Xun’s preface to Outcry, “Imagine an iron house: without windows or doors, utterly indestructible, and full of sound sleepers — all about to suffocate to death. Let them die in their sleep, and they will feel nothing. Is it right to cry out, to rouse the light sleepers among them, causing them inconsolable agony before they die?” (Lu, 2009, 19). Lu Xun named the book Outcry and utilized literature as a means of awakening sleeping Chinese. He argues in My Vi...

Month: March 2022

History of Instant Noodle

Lu Xun’s Critics of Chinese Feudal Ethics