A deeply evocative narrative about the profound connections between mothers and daughters, The Valley of Amazement returns readers to the compelling territory of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. With her characteristic insight and humor, she conjures a story of inherited trauma, desire and deception, and the power and stubbornness of love.

    But the "poison dragons" of misfortune shatter his orderly existence. First, when his village is threatened by a vicious civil war, his family stability is threatened by his second son, a brutal rebel officer. Meanwhile, Yun Cai struggles to free an old friend, P'ei Ti, from a hellish prison—no easy task when P'ei Ti is the rebels' most valuable hostage, and Yun Cai sees himself only as a frightened old man. Throughout his ordeals, Yun Cai draws from the glittering memories of his youth, when he journeyed to the capital to study poetry, joined the upper ranks of the civil service, and secured the friendship of P'ei Ti. Above all, he reflects Su Lin, a great love he won and lost, and for which he paid with his freedom and almost his life. Yun Cai is forced to reconsider all that he is and all that he has ever been in order to summon the wit and courage to confront the warlord General An-Shu and his beautiful but cruel consort, the Lady Ta-Chi.

    Every book in the Mandarin Companion series is carefully written to use characters, words, and grammar that a learner is likely to know. Level 2 is intended for Chinese learners at a low intermediate level. Most learners who have been able to comfortably read Mandarin Companion Level 1 should be able to read this book. This series is designed to combine simplicity of characters with an easy-to-understand storyline that helps learners grow their vocabulary and language comprehension abilities. The more they read, the better they will become at reading and grasping the Chinese language. Great Expectations is hailed as Charles Dickens' masterpiece. A gripping tale of love and loss, aspiration and moral redemption, the story follows the young orphan Xiaomao (Pip) from poverty to a life of unexpected opportunity and wealth. In Part 1, Xiaomao (Pip) is raised by his short-tempered older sister and her husband who run a small repair shop in the outskirts of Shanghai. Xiaomao dreams of leaving his life of poverty behind after becoming playmates with the beautiful Bingbing (Estella), daughter of the eccentric Bai Xiaojie (Ms. Havisham). His prospects for the future are bleak, until one day a mysterious benefactor gives Xiaomao the opportunity of a lifetime.

    Transformed from a swampland wilderness into a dazzling, modern-day Babylon, the Shanghai that predated Mao′s cultural revolution was a city like no other: redolent with opium and underworld crime, booming with foreign trade, blessed with untold wealth and marred by abject squalor.Journalist Stella Dong captures all the exoticism, extremes, and excitement of this legendary city as if it were a larger-than-life character in a fantastic novel.

    The Mencius, in which he recounts his dialogues with kings, dukes and military men, as well as other philosophers, is one of the Four Books that make up the essential Confucian corpus. It takes up Confucius's theories of jen, or goodness and yi, righteousness, explaining that the individual can achieve harmony with mankind and the universe by perfecting his innate moral nature and acting with benevolence and justice. Mencius' strikingly modern views on the duties of subjects and their rulers or the evils of war, created a Confucian orthodoxy that has remained intact since the third century BCE.

    Together, they have ten children. At last, she can pass on the stories she has heard—magical tales of men from the sea—and her warrior’s courage, along with her wonderful kueh (cakes).But the cultural shift towards the West has begun. Chye Hoon finds herself afraid of losing the heritage she so prizes as her children move more and more into the modernising Western world.

    Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure (1995) under one cover.