This has been an important year for the Association for Asian Studies. With a membership of over 4700 we have become by far the largest organization for foreign area studies in the U.S.—and probably in the world. This growth in size has brought with it new problems of organization and new responsibilities for leadership in our profession. So as not to lose touch with our membership, we have undergone a major reorganization with the adoption of our new Constitution. This provides for four area councils, through which leadership would be shared with a much larger number of elected officers, and greater individual initiative would be allowed in the development of studies in each area.

Until very recently, much of the literary scholarship on the eighteenth-century Chinese novel Honglou meng (The Story of the Stone or Dream of the Red Chamber) was centered on what was seen as the autobiographical nature of the work. Critics of the novel, especially those in China, tended to focus their attention on the life of the author, Cao Xueqin (d. 1763), believing the interpretation of the novel to be—to a large extent—hinged on a successful reconstruction of Cao Xueqin's familial relationships, especially with those members of the Cao clan such as Red Inkstone (Zhiyanzhai) who were the original audience of his manuscript. Yet, any literary work—even a truly autobiographical one—arises from its tradition. Its meaning will be better understood and its aesthetic values better appreciated when we consider it in relation to other works in that tradition. For our interpretation of Honglou meng, what is more pertinent is therefore not the author's personal ties to his relatives but the ties of the novel to its “relatives,” works that formed the literary context for its creation.

This article examines the zoological gardens established by Japanese imperialists in colonial Seoul (1908) and Taipei (1914). Drawing on multilingual sources, it argues that zoos explicitly exposed the unequal interethnic and interspecies hierarchies that undergirded the colonial project. The colonial zoo was an ambivalent “dreamscape”: a carefully constructed landscape of iron cages and manicured pathways wherein colonizers’ dreams of ordering the natural world and colonized populations existed in uneasy tension with the actual experiences of zoo visitors and encaged zoo animals. Intellectuals sometimes criticized zoo excesses or identified the bondage of caged animals with the colonized experience. Yet these zoos also enjoyed immense popularity as Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese visitors alike participated in the physical and discursive subjugation of zoo animals. Sensitivity to these contradictions, this essay contends, is essential for understanding both the broader significance of these institutions and their contested legacies today.