Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Arriving to the United States from Taiwan in 1964, Mr. Hsin Yuan Cheng, an immigrant with an extensive background in journalism and broadcasting, has spent more than thirty years of his life immersed in the hustle and bustle of Chinatown. Over the past three decades, from 1970 to 2000, he has both reported and witnessed … Read more
One of the most difficult tasks of teaching Japanese to English speakers is the explanation of wa. Linguists are always trying to find systematic or consistent ways of explaining what something means. For those who don’t speak Japanese, wa is a sentence particle that goes on the topic of the sentence, telling someone what is … Read more
Ravi Kulkarni discusses his year-long experience in India, and thoughts on what AAARI can do for CUNY faculty and students.
Asian American poets Meena Alexander, Regie Cabico, Luis Francia and Kimiko Hahn share their latest work.
The Mahayana school of Buddhism in China often emphasized the role of altruism and disparaged self-salvation. Its sutras were considered to be the first sermons by the Buddha whose profound ideas were too difficult for the ordinary people to understand. To cater to their level, it was said that Buddha then delivered the Agama Sutra for the less intellectually endowed. For more than 1500 years after it was translated into Chinese, Agama Sutra has been ignored by Chinese Buddhists mainly because of this prejudice. More recently, Master Yin Shun has vastly expanded the research started by Lu Jing, and has written many volumes of texts to clarify the origins of Buddhism. This lecture will be based mostly on writings by him and his disciples.
Beginning with a quote by Michel Foucault, Prof. Tricia Lin explained how transnation and translation were used as cultural survival strategies. The audience asked questions that explored the issue of post-colonial island literature and its impact. “We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near … Read more