Dear Editor:

I am Italian, and I live and work in Rome. This July I will complete my Doctorate in East Asian History, on the subject of a period of Taiwan history (1895-1945).

After my recent subscription to your excellent magazine "Sinorama" I have just received my first issue, and I must say that I was not disappointed; the graphics are very well done and the articles are very interesting.

I would like to express my personal appreciation of the two books I requested when subscribing to the magazine, In search of Photo Past (Ⅰ,Ⅱ) which offer the western reader beautiful, realistic and moving pictures of Taiwan life, the quality of which has seldom been equaled in photographic publications.

In particular, I very much appreciated the photographs by Teng Nan-kuang and Lin Shou-yi.

The photos from the 1930s by Lin Shou-yi are very similar to the ones taken in Italy in the same period. My grandfather owned a photographic studio in Rome, Italy from 1928 to 1970; looking at Mr. Lin's photos, I had the same sensations as when as a child I looked through my grandfather's Italian photographs in the late 1960s.

Therefore, even if Taiwan and Italy are far from each other, I was able to detect in the eyes of the subjects chosen by Mr. Lin and Mr. Teng the same quiet dignity which we Europeans also had in those days, so far from the stress of modern life: expressions of simple, serene faces not yet devoured by the hectic life and the obsession with "possessing" at any cost, even superfluous things.

Thank you for letting me relive these Pleasant sensations.

Marco Zagarola

Italy

Dear Editor:

Hello! I'm an overseas Chinese living in Dominica. Ever since an issue of yours introduced hydroponic farming, agricultural experts here have been pestering me to teach them about it. I'm a mechanical engineer and I've been out of touch with things back home for more than a decade, but I've had all this "trouble" brought on me simply because I come from the R.O.C. on Taiwan.

Now all I can is play along willy-nilly and ask you to send me any information or books you can (I'll reimburse you for costs), the more detailed the better. Which kinds of flowers, vegetables or soybeans, for instance, are most suited for hydroponic farming? How should the nutrients be mixed? What kinds of equipment, temperature, lighting and so forth are needed? Maybe you could teach we one or two kinds at first.

The ardent expectations of the agricultural experts here have made me feel I have a duty to share our technical accomplishments with them. Doing so is the most direct and effective form of person-to-person diplomacy.

Han En Dominica

Dear Editor:

I see that Sinorama is using recycled paper for the "Potpourri" section, with the declaration "to avoid wasting global resources, these pages consist of recycled paper." The intention to protect the environment is certainly laudable, but a doubt remains in my mind--why not set an example for other publications by using recycled paper for the whole magazine? Otherwise, the use of recycled paper for just a few pages only makes the magazine as a whole look visually uncoordinated.

Chang Hui-lin Taipei

Note: Sinorama places equal emphasis on text and pictures. At the current stage of technology, recycled paper is still unable to faithfully bring out the spirit of color photographs, so we have had to begin use of recycled paper with "Potpourri," which is all text. We are now testing the possibility of using it for the whole magazine, and if we find recycled paper better quality and effectiveness, we will certainly use more of it.