the poppy war: a study

There’s a lot going on there. Altan and Rin are different manifestations of how war and trauma are cyclical. Altan in particular, because his response to what was done to him is to burn the rest of the world down and Rin’s response to what happened to her and Altan and the rest of their entire race is to burn a country down. They’re also... See more

I was reading all this stuff by my freshman year of college, and it’s hard to separate when the academic interest started. I was just really into the stories that my family was telling me about their experiences in Chinese history. That really covers everything: every bad thing imaginable

that happened to China in the 20th century. It’s hard to... See more

School comes first and the stories come out of that. For instance, Book Three focuses a lot on military campaigns in the Chinese civil war, and I knew all of that already because I’ve written papers about it, so it was easy to map out the campaign and map out the strategy because I’ve been thinking about them for a long time. Also, fiction writing,... See more

The simplistic version of this answer is that its been politicized heavily, but that this is not a black and white issue where one side is clearly at blame. I can’t say that all of Japan has disrespected the legacy of Nanjing, because the history and politics are so complex. But it is true that on the Japanese side, there are many people in... See more