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You may have never known how much Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Milan Kundera had in common - until an Ang Lee movie changed one name for the other. In "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman", a story set in Taiwan, Lee's home province, local bookworms are nibbling at the novels of Kundera. But when the script reached James Schamus, Lee's New York-based writer-producer, Kundera morphed into Dostoyevsky. It's not because the two novelists shared thematic or stylistic traits, but because the Russian writer occupies a place in the minds of American readers similar to that of the Czech-French in all parts of the Chinese reading public. An allusion to Kundera - or being caught reading his book, possibly in a fashionably decorated caf - gives one a certain cachet, an implication that you are cool and belong to the hip crowd. This is what I call a cross-cultural conversion. A dictionary may help you translate words and names, but no tools - old-tech or hi-tech - can help you interpret the finer nuances of culture such as this one. All it takes is tons of knowledge and hands-on experience. That is why Ang Lee's biography, recently published in the mainland after being reprinted 13 times in Taiwan, stands out so prominently. The book, which contains the above episode, brims with acute observations and sagely insight. Even if you haven't seen any of Lee's movies - or if you don't like them - you'll find his words full of revelations. He is simply a marvel of cross-cultural jaywalking. He observes rules when he sees fit, but more often he creates new rules by opening up worlds we didn't even know existed. | 
