Best of
China

1995

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant


Yu Hua - 1995
    His visits become lethally frequent as he struggles to provide for his wife and three sons at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Shattered to discover that his favorite son was actually born of a liaison between his wife and a neighbor, he suffers his greatest indignity, while his wife is publicly scorned as a prostitute. Although the poverty and betrayals of Mao's regime have drained him, Xu Sanguan ultimately finds strength in the blood ties of his family. With rare emotional intensity, grippingly raw descriptions of place and time, and clear-eyed compassion, Yu Hua gives us a stunning tapestry of human life in the grave particulars of one man's days.

The Hundred Secret Senses


Amy Tan - 1995
    Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese, but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes."Even as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendor, squalor, and violence of Manchu China. And out of the friction between her narrators, Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly, sadly, hilariously, with searing and vivid prose.

The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature


Joseph S.M. LauTong Hua - 1995
    In this new edition Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt have selected fresh works from familiar authors and have augmented the collection with poetry, stories from the colonial period in Taiwan, literature by Tibetan authors, samplings from the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution, stories by post-Mao authors Wang Anyi and Gao Xingjian, literature with a homosexual theme, and examples from the modern "cruel youth" movement. Lau and Goldblatt have also updated their notes and their biographies of featured writers and poets. Now fully up to date, this critical resource more than ever provides readers with a thorough introduction to Chinese society and culture.

Thread of the Silkworm


Iris Chang - 1995
    The definitive biography of Tsien Hsue-Shen, the pioneer of the American space age who was mysteriously accused of being a communist, deported, and became -- to America's continuing chagrin -- the father of the Chinese missile program.

The Man Who Couldn't Be Killed: An Incredible Story of Faith and Courage During China's Cultural Revolution


Stanley Maxwell - 1995
    His face was swollen from the beating the night before. His legs throbbed from standing through endless hours of interrogation. But his heart rejoiced at the opportunity to share his devotion to his best friend. Accused of being a counterrevolutionary, Mr. Wong was struck by the unexpected heavy sentence-twenty years in a hard-labor camp. His persecutors thought they had taken away Mr. Wong's religious freedom and tried to take his life. But they didn't know the intensity of their prisoner's faith or the power of his God. The Man Who Couldn't Be Killed is an unforgettable story of faith and miraculous deliverance in Communist China at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Wong's unflinching courage for the Savior and the miracles that saved his life will inspire you to believe in God who is greater that any problem or circumstance. Book Specs Paper BackPublisher: PPPAPrinted: 1995Pages: 222 Table of Contents Author's Note Up the Whampoa Into the Bund Dream of Red Mansions Two Bibles in the Loot Long-Distance Study Bigamy and Baptism Resignation A Warning and a Raid News of the End of the World Fasting and a Basket of Eggs A Roll of Renminbi and an Angel The Woman on the Bridge Lu's Night of Glory Prison Visit Public Trial The Journey to the West A Taste of Hard Labor Camp Praying Under the Gun Sabbath Is Just Saturday "Please, Don't Make Him Die!" An Angel Untied the Knot "Say the Ten Regulations" Traitorous Uncles Icy Canals and Wild Dogs Lee's Last Requests Singing to His Execution Red Guard Raid Five-Flower Knot and a Bucket Self-Criticism and the Counterrevolutionary Hat

On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family


Lisa See - 1995
    There, her grand-mother and great-aunt told her intriguing, colorful stories about their family's past - stories of missionaries, concubines, tong wars, glamorous nightclubs, and the determined struggle to triumph over racist laws and discrimination. They spoke of how Lisa's great-great-grandfather emigrated from his Chinese village to the United States; how his son followed him, married a Caucasian woman, and despite great odds, went on to become one of the most prominent Chinese on "Gold Mountain" (the Chinese name for the United States). As an adult, See spent five years collecting the details of her family's remarkable history. She interviewed nearly one hundred relatives - both Chinese and Caucasian, rich and poor - and pored over documents at the National Archives, the immigration office, and in countless attics, basements, and closets for the intimate nuances of her ancestors' lives.

Imperfect Paradise: Twenty-Four Stories


Shen Congwen - 1995
    The most comprehensive and authoritative representation in English of the remarkable Shen Congwen canon, ranging from the polished stories that made him a serious contender for the Nobel literary prize in the 1980s to lesser known, extravagant experimental pieces.

China Dome


William H. Lovejoy - 1995
    Across the globe, a master terrorist plans to make sure the airport never takes off by hijacking the world's most advanced super-jetliner. Former Air Force fighter pilot Daniel Kerry is the only man to see it coming--and is the only man who can stop him.

Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China


Robert Ford Campany - 1995
    Most items told of encounters between humans and various denizens of the spirit-world, or of the miraculous feats of masters of esoteric arts; some described the wonders of exotic lands, or transmitted fragments of ancient mythology. This genre of writing came to be known as zhiguai (accounts of anomalies).Who were the authors of these books, and why did they write of these strange matters? Why was such writing seen as a compelling thing to do? In this book, the first comprehensive study in a Western language of the zhiguai genre in its formative period, Campany sets forth a new view of the nature of the genre and the reasons for its emergence. He shows that contemporaries portrayed it as an extension of old royal and imperial traditions in which strange reports from the periphery were collected in the capital as a way of ordering the world. He illuminates how authors writing from most of the religious and cultural perspectives of the times--including Daoists, Buddhists, Confucians, and others--used the genre differently for their own persuasive purposes, in the process fundamentally altering the old traditions of anomaly-collecting. Analyzing the accounts of anomalies both in the context of Chinese religious and cultural history and as examples of a cross-culturally attested type of discourse, Campany combines in-depth Sinological research with broad-ranging comparative thinking in his approach to these puzzling, rich texts.

Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 6: Military Technology: Missiles and Sieges


Joseph Needham - 1995
    (Part 7--on gunpowder and all aspects of explosive weapons--has already been published, while Part 8--on cavalry techniques and signaling--is still in preparation.) The present volume opens with an introduction on Chinese attitudes to warfare in general. Four major sections follow: on the making and use of simple bows; on the crossbow, the standard weapon of the Han armies, and its introduction to the Western world; on the pre-gunpowder forms of artillery, including the invention of the trebuchet; and on the art of siege warfare in which the Mohists were particularly interested. There is a good deal of material on siege-warfare available, and this final section is a substantial one, covering all aspects in detail.

The Silk Route: 7,000 Miles of History


John S. Major - 1995
    But thousands of years ago, the production of silk cloth was one of China's most prized secrets. So how did silk become one of the most sought-after materials in the world?With lavish illustrations and a highly informative text, The Silk Route traces the early history of the silk trade—from the mulberry groves of China to the marketplace in Byzantium—and explores how two of the world's greatest empires were brought together, forever opening the channels of commerce between East and West.A treasure through the years, this book is perfect for the classroom and independent book reports.

Colloquial Chinese: The Complete Course for Beginners


Kan Qian - 1995
    The course teaches both the romanised system and basic character use. Characters are broken down into their smallest parts in order to show their use in a systematic and graded manner.

Aurel Stein: Pioneer of the Silk Road


Annabel Walker - 1995
    For thirty years, in the face of fierce rivalry, this brilliant archaeologist led the race to uncover a long-lost Buddhist civilization which had lain for a thousand years beneath China's deserts. Today the treasures which he and his competitors - from Germany, France, Japan, Sweden and America - removed from the sand-covered tombs and temples of the ancient Silk Road are scattered among the museums of a dozen countries. In all Stein marched some 25,000 miles across Central Asia, often in appalling conditions, accompanied always by a small fox-terrier. Festooned with international honours, including a British knighthood, the Jewish Hungarian-born orientalist today lies in the lonely Christian cemetery at Kabul, where he died in 1943, aged 80, on the eve of one last great journey into the past.

Buddhism in Chinese Society: An Economic History from the Fifth to the Tenth Centuries


Jacques Gernet - 1995
    First published in French in 1956, this classic work integrates the study of Buddhist doctrine with that of Chinese society from the fifth to the tenth centuries.

The Children of China: An Artist's Journey


Song Nan Zhang - 1995
    A boy plays chess on the ground with his shepherd grandfather. A teenager tends her father’s pottery shop. At festivals a child plays hide-and-seek, behind yellow parasols, and stilt dancers wait to compete.

Laws Harsh As Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law


Lucy E. Salyer - 1995
    She argues that the struggles between Chinese immigrants, U.S. government officials, and the lower federal courts that took place around the turn of the century established fundamental principles that continue to dominate immigration law today and make it unique among branches of American law. By establishing the centrality of the Chinese to immigration policy, Salyer also integrates the history of Asian immigrants on the West Coast with that of European immigrants in the East. Salyer demonstrates that Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans mounted sophisticated and often-successful legal challenges to the enforcement of exclusionary immigration policies. Ironically, their persistent litigation contributed to the development of legal doctrines that gave the Bureau of Immigration increasing power to counteract resistance. Indeed, by 1924, immigration law had begun to diverge from constitutional norms, and the Bureau of Immigration had emerged as an exceptionally powerful organization, free from many of the constraints imposed upon other government agencies.

The Empress and the Silkworm


Lily Toy Hong - 1995
    A fictionalized account of the Empress of China's discovery, around 2700 B.C., that the cocoons of the worms in her mulberry trees were made of fine, shiny, silken thread which could be made into beautiful cloth.

Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar


Edwin G. Pulleyblank - 1995
    Focusing on the language of the high classical period, which ranges from the time of Confucius to the unification of the empire by Qin in 221, the book pays particular attention to the Mencius, the Lúnyu, and, to a lesser extent, the Zuõzhuàn texts.Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar starts with a brief historical overview and a discussion of the relation between the writing system and the phonology. This is followed by an outline of overall principles of word order and sentence structure. The next sections deal with the main sentence types – nominal predicates, verbal predicates, and numberical expressions, which constitute a special type of quasiverbal predication. The final sections cover such topics as subordinate constitutents of sentences, nondeclarative sentence types, and complex sentences.

Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937


Bryna Goodman - 1995
    From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, sojourners from other provinces dominated the population of Shanghai and other expanding commercial Chinese cities. These immigrants formed native place associations beginning in the imperial period and persisting into the mid-twentieth century. Goodman examines the modernization of these associations and argues that under weak urban government, native place sentiment and organization flourished and had a profound effect on city life, social order and urban and national identity.

Sleepless Nights: Verses for the Wakeful (College Audience Papers)


Wen-siang - 1995
    Through this holocaust wandered a lone buddhist poet, a pacifist and feminist, a former politcal prisoner and a lifelong exile and sojourner in his own homeland. Wen-siang's poetry caputres the pathos of his time with exquisite sensitivity and tragic beauty, illuminating its harvest of both human suffering and hope. Sleepless Nights gives voice to a people groaning under the weight of history--the conscripts and peasants, the women and families, the refugees adrft in a land torn by conflict. Among the greatest masterpieces of secular Buddhist poetry, here translated into English for the first time , these verses mock the folly of tyrants and celebrate the indomitability of life.

Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China


Xiaomei Chen - 1995
    Xiaomei Chen offers an insightful account of the unremittingly favorable depiction of Western culture and its negative characterization of Chinese culture in post-Mao China since 1978. She examines the cultural and political interrelationship between the East and West from a vantage point more complex than that accommodated by most current theories of Western imperialism and colonialism. Going beyond Edward Said's construction in Orientalism of cross-cultural appropriations as a defining facet of Western imperialism, Chen argues that the appropriation of Western discourse-what she calls "Occidentalism"-can actually have a politically and ideologically liberating effect on contemporary non-Western culture. She maintains that simplistic allegations of Orientalism frequently found in current critical discourses seriously underestimate the complexities of intercultural and multicultural relationships. Using China as the focus of her analysis, Chen examines a variety of cultural media, from Shakespearean drama, to modernist poetry, to contemporary Chinese television and popular fiction. She thus places sinology in the general context of Western theoretical discourses, such as Eurocentrism, postcolonialism, nationalism, modernism, feminism, and literary hermeneutics, showing that it has a vital role to play in the study of Orient and Occident and their now unavoidable symbiotic relationship. Occidentalism presents a new model of comparative literary and cultural studies that reenvisions cross-cultural appropriation. It will be indispensable to future discussions of Orientalism, Occidentalism, and postcolonialism, as well as subaltern studies, Asian studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and non-Western drama.

China: A Literary Companion


Susan Whitfield - 1995
    China has indeed been invented many times, in the astonishment of visitors and the dreams of poets; but because of its historical and geographical vastness it accommodates all the inventions as truths. For centuries the elite of China's civil service was a class of scholar-gentlemen who gained preferment through education in China's literary classics. In consequence it has one of the world's richest literatures. Its dramatic landscapes and populous cosmopolitan cities invited the wonderment of visitors as various as Marco Polo, Lord Macartney and Noel Coward; but some of the sharpest as well as the most lyrical observations come from the calligraphy brushes of its own writers.

Illustrated Guide to Great Tang Records on the Western Regions 图解大唐西域记


玄奘 - 1995
    Each essay is composed of five parts: the original text, translations, notes, annotations, and evaluations. The authoritative version is chosen and proofread carefully, with expert translations accompanied by ancient engravings. 本书记录了玄奘游历印度、西域旅途的见闻。每篇选文由原文、译文、题解、注释、评析五个部分组成,选取权威版本精心校对,延请专家精心翻译,并配以古代版画。

The chalice and the blade in Chinese culture: Gender relations and social models


Jiayin, Ed.; The Chinese Partnership Research Group Min - 1995
    

Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1979


Julia F. Andrews - 1995
    From 1949 to 1979 the Chinese government controlled the lives and work of the country's artists—these were also years of extreme isolation from international artistic dialogue. During this period the Chinese Communist Party succeeded in eradicating most of the artistic styles and techniques it found politically repugnant. By 1979, traditional landscape painting had been replaced by a new style and subject that was strikingly different from both contemporary Western art and that of other Chinese areas such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.Through vivid firsthand accounts, Andrews recreates the careers of many individual artists who were forced to submit to a vacillating policy regarding style, technique, medium, and genre. She discusses the cultural controls that the government used, the ways in which artists responded, and the works of art that emerged as a result. She particularly emphasizes the influence of the Soviet Union on Chinese art and the problems it created for the practice of traditional painting.This book opens the way to new, stimulating comparisons of Western and Eastern cultures and will be welcomed by art historians, political scientists, and scholars of Asia.

Taiwan


Azra Moiz - 1995
    All books of the critically-acclaimed Cultures of the World(R) series ensure an immersive experience by offering vibrant photographs with descriptive nonfiction narratives, and interactive activities such as creating an authentic traditional dish from an easy-to-follow recipe. Copious maps and detailed timelines present the past and present of the country, while exploration of the art and architecture help your readers to understand why diversity is the spice of Life.

China Pilot: Flying for Chiang and Chennault


Felix Smith - 1995
    Smith recounts in vivid detail his experiences ferrying troops and equipment for the Nationalists during the China civil war, supplying supplies to war-torn regions, and flying other missions during post-World War II conflicts. 16 photos.

Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600-1400


Valerie Hansen - 1995
    In the process it illuminates specific everyday concerns during China's medieval transformation. Valerie Hansen translates and analyzes surviving contracts and also draws on tales of the supernatural, rare legal sources, plays, language texts, and other anecdotal evidence to describe how contracts were actually used. She explains that the educated wrote their own contracts, whereas the illiterate paid scribes to draft them and read them aloud. The contracts reveal much about everyday life: problems with inflation that resulted from the introduction of the first paper money in the world; the persistence of women's rights to own and sell land at a time when their lives were becoming more constricted; and the litigiousness of families, which were complicated products of remarriages, adoptions, and divorces. The Chinese even armed their dead with contracts asserting ownership of their grave plots, and Hansen provides details of an underworld court system in which the dead could sue and be sued. Illustrations and maps enrich a book that will be fascinating for anyone interested in Chinese life and society.