Despite her tender years, Joanna Wang’s
(王若琳) voice conveys complex and mature emotions.
Since the singer’s debut album, Start From Here, released in 2008 when she was just 18, Wang has risen to become the Chinese-speaking world’s preeminent jazz vocalist.
Tomorrow night she presents her first stadium concert in Taiwan, titled 2010 Taipei Concert Adult Storybook (2010台北演唱會大人故事書), at the National Taiwan University Sports Center (台大綜合體育館).
Behind the image of a highly coiffured, impeccably mannered jazz singer lies a restless young spirit who yearns to be taken seriously as a musician in her own right. Wang, known for her renditions of cover songs, said in an interview earlier this week that she wants to record “an album of my own songs.”
Wang spent four years performing in Taiwan’s pub circuit before launching her studio career.
For tomorrow’s concert, the title of which comes from Wang’s second album, a two-CD set (Joanna and 王若琳, The Adult Storybook), she will sing a duet with Mando-pop idol Rainie Yang (楊丞琳) of the latter’s Running Into Love (遇上愛).
For more information, see Page 13 of yesterday’s edition of the Taipei Times for an in-depth interview with Wang, or go to http://bit.ly/4IXAJa to read the article online.
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
From a nadir following the 2020 national elections, two successive chairs of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) and Eric Chu (朱立倫), tried to reform and reinvigorate the old-fashioned Leninist-structured party to revive their fortunes electorally. As examined in “Donovan’s Deep Dives: How Eric Chu revived the KMT,” Chu in particular made some savvy moves that made the party viable electorally again, if not to their full powerhouse status prior to the 2014 Sunflower movement. However, while Chu has made some progress, there remain two truly enormous problems facing the KMT: the party is in financial ruin and
RSS