天涯客 [Tian Ya Ke]


Priest - 2021
    番外已更~谁是谁的天涯过客?一场始料未及的邂逅,一个没有结局的开始,一座城,一个人。第一篇文章,分两次更新,感谢大家的支持。欢迎关注微博@-浅青衣-"Faraway Wanderers"A tale about the former leader of a special organization that served under royalty, now leaving his past life behind and unintentionally getting involved with the martial world.

China Dream


Ma Jian - 2018
    Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party’s moral failings” (Mike Ives, The New York Times).Called “Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!" by Margaret Atwood on Twitter, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode's nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future.Exposing the damage inflicted on a nation's soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth, China Dream is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state-imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.

Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio


Pu Songling - 1740
    With their elegant prose, witty wordplay and subtle charm, the 104 stories in this selection reveal a world in which nothing is as it seems.

Spring Moon: A Novel of China


Bette Bao Lord - 1981
    in an ancient land of breathtaking beauty and exotic surprise ... a courageous woman triumphs over her world's ultimate tragedy.Behind the garden walls of the House of Chang, pampered daughter Spring Moon is born into luxury and privilege. But the tempests of change sweep her into a new world -- one of hardship, turmoil, and heartbreak, one that threatens to destroy her husband, her family, and her darkest secret love. Through a tumultuous lifetime, Spring Moon must cling to her honor, to the memory of a time gone by, and to a destiny, foretold at her birth, that has yet to be fulfilled.

天官赐福 [Tiān Guān Cì Fú]


墨香铜臭 - 2017
    Unsurprisingly, he ascended to the Heavens at a very young age. Now, eight hundred years later, Xie Lian ascends to the Heavens for the third time as the laughing stock of all three realms. On his first task as a god, he meets a mysterious demon who rules the ghosts and terrifies the Heavens……yet unbeknownst to Xie Lian, this demon king has been paying attention to him for a very, very long time. (-novelupdates.com)

The Concubine's Daughter


Pai Kit Fai - 2009
    Lotus Feet. He would give his daughter the dainty feet of a courtesan. This would enhance her beauty and her price, making her future shine like a new coin. He smiled to himself, pouring fresh tea. And it would stop her from running away…When the young concubine of an old farmer in rural China gives birth to a daughter called Li-Xia, or “Beautiful One,” the child seems destined to become a concubine herself. Li refuses to submit to her fate, outwitting her father’s orders to bind her feet and escaping the silk farm with an English sea captain. Li takes her first steps toward fulfilling her mother’s dreams of becoming a scholar — but her final triumph must be left to her daughter, Su Sing, “Little Star,” in a journey that will take her from remote mountain refuges to the perils of Hong Kong on the eve of World War II.

Three Souls


Janie Chang - 2013
    But only in death could I confirm this ... So begins the haunting and captivating tale, set in 1935 China, of the ghost of a young woman named Leiyin, who watches her own funeral from above and wonders why she is being denied entry to the afterlife. Beside her are three souls—stern and scholarly yang; impulsive, romantic yin; and wise, shining hun—who will guide her toward understanding. She must, they tell her, make amends.As Leiyin delves back in time with the three souls to review her life, she sees the spoiled and privileged teenager she once was, a girl who is concerned with her own desires while China is fractured by civil war and social upheaval. At a party, she meets Hanchin, a captivating left-wing poet and translator, and instantly falls in love with him.When Leiyin defies her father to pursue Hanchin, she learns the harsh truth—that she is powerless over her fate. Her punishment for disobedience leads to exile, an unwanted marriage, a pregnancy, and, ultimately, her death. And when she discovers what she must do to be released from limbo into the afterlife, Leiyin realizes that the time for making amends is shorter than she thought.Suffused with history and literature, Three Souls is an epic tale of revenge and betrayal, forbidden love, and the price we are willing to pay for freedom.

Dream of Ding Village


Yan Lianke - 2005
    Set in a poor village in Henan province, it is a deeply moving and beautifully written account of a blood-selling ring in contemporary China. Based on a real-life blood-selling scandal in eastern China, Dream of Ding Village is the result of three years of undercover work by Yan Lianke, who worked as an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist in an effort to study a small village decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated blood selling. Whole villages were wiped out with no responsibility taken or reparations paid. Dream of Ding Village focuses on one family, destroyed when one son rises to the top of the Party pile as he exploits the situation, while another son is infected and dies. The result is a passionate and steely critique of the rate at which China is developing and what happens to those who get in the way.

Jin Ping Mei (the Golden Lotus)


Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng - 1610
    This edition was derived from the Egerton translation, minus the Latin, with a few euphemisms thrown in, but is considerably more complete than the Olympia Press version most Westerners are familiar with. Given the fine academic tradition of disassociating one's self from erotica in any form, Western scholars will often compare this book with... Don Quixote and other non-English masterpieces of a certain age. To which we at Silk Pagoda reply: considering that Jin Ping Mei comes to us as part of a literary cycle (Outlaws of the Marsh) and is primarily a fin de siecle romance with adultery as key theme, the book it best compares to is of course Mort d'Arthur, and Jin Ping Mei's author should be celebrated for, unlike Mallory, experiencing life outside prison walls.

The Crazed


Ha Jin - 2002
    It initially seems a simple duty until the professor begins to rave, pleading with invisible tormentors and denouncing his family...Are these just manifestations of illness, or is Yang spewing up the truth? In a China convulsed by the Tiananmen uprising, those who listen to the truth are as much at risk as those who speak it. Lyrical and heart-breaking, The Crazed is an incisive portrait of modern Chinese society.

微微一笑很倾城 (A Slight Smile is Very Charming)


顾漫 - 2009
    Soon after basketball player, swimmer, all-around excellent student, and game company president, Xiao Nai, uses both tactics on and off-line to take this beauty’s heart. Therefore this romance slowly bloomed. (Description borrowed from Shushengbar)

The Prisoner in the Mask


Dennis Wheatley - 1957
    But why? Why should a French aristocrat renounce his country and live in exile? The answer lay in the Paris of the nineties; a world of superficial glamour, and under the surface, deep social and political trouble. The army, discredited by the Dreyfus case, was being purged. The young de Richleau, cadet and then instructor at the military academy of St. Cyr, became involved in a conspiracy. A conspiracy to restore the French monarchy. The Duc de Vendome was secretly coached in his future role of King.Then, the conspiracy was betrayed. The results: death for some. For Richleau, the life of a fugitive, but a fugitive who had declared a single-handed vendetta against the government; who was determined to rescue the Prince.

The Secrets of Jin-shei


Alma Alexander - 2003
    And as one of them becomes Dragon Empress, her determination to hold power against the sages of the temple, against the marauding forces from other kingdoms, drags the sisterhood into a dangerous world of court intrigue, plot and counterplot, and brings them into conflict with each other from which only the one who remains true to all the vows she made at the very beginning to the dying Princess Empress can rescue them.An amazing and unusual book, based on some historical fact, full of drama, adventure and conflict like a Shakespearean history play, it's a novel about kinship and a society of women, of mysticism, jealousy, fate, destiny, all set in the wonderful, swirling background of medieval China.

Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas


Su Tong - 1990
    The title novella, "Raise the Red Lantern," which became a critically acclaimed film, tells the story of Lotus, a young woman whose father's suicide forces her to become the concubine of a wealthy merchant. Crushed by loneliness, despair, and cruel treatment, Lotus finds her descent into insanity both a weapon and a refuge."Nineteen Thirty-Four Escapes" is an account of a family's struggles during one momentous year; plagued by disease, death, and the shady promise of life in a larger town, the family slowly disintegrates.Finally, "Opium Family" details the last years of a landowning clan whose demise is brought about by corruption, lust, and treachery -- fruits of the insidious crop they harvest.

Red Azalea


Anchee Min - 1993
    As a child, she was asked to publicly humiliate a teacher; at seventeen, she was sent to work at a labor collective. Forbidden to speak, dress, read, write, or love as she pleased, she found a lifeline in a secret love affair with another woman. Miraculously selected for the film version of one of Madame Mao’s political operas, Min’s life changed overnight. Then Chairman Mao suddenly died, taking with him an entire world. A revelatory and disturbing portrait of China, Anchee Min’s memoir is exceptional for its candor, its poignancy, its courage, and for its prose.