Sagwa lived in the House of the Foolish Magistrate, a greedy man who made up rules that helped only himself. One day, Sagwa fell into an inkwell and accidentally changed one of the Foolish Magistrate's rules. Little did Sagwa know she would alter the fate—and the appearance—of Chinese cats forever!

    In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.“Immortality,” winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives. “After a Life” illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations.These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.From the Hardcover edition.

    Just like all children, Jimmy likes to eat candy but doesn’t even want to taste fruits and vegetables. He sneaks into the kitchen to try to find a bag with candies that was hidden inside the cupboard. What happens right after Jimmy climbs up to reach the bag of candy? You’ll just have to read this illustrated children’s book to find out what happened next. But since that day, Jimmy starts to develop healthy eating habits and even likes to eat these fruits and vegetables that he didn’t want to taste before. This is the third book in the collection of short bedtime stories for kids, and it’s written especially for those parents who struggle every mealtime to make their kids eat healthy food. The gorgeous pictures will captivate your kids' hearts, and they will love to read this children’s book over and over again. It is suitable as a read-aloud book for preschoolers at bedtime or a self-read book for older children. Scroll up and buy this picture kids’ book now. Your children will love going back to this bedtime story again and again.

    A man of simple needs whose greatest ambition is to one day own his own rickshaw, Xiangzi is nonetheless thwarted, time and again, in his attempts to improve his lot in life.One of the most important and popular works of twentieth-century Chinese literature, Rickshaw Boy is an unflinchingly honest, darkly comic look at a life on the margins of society and a searing indictment of the philosophy of individualism.

    Designed specifically for native-English speakers approaching Japanese as a second language, this book presents 142 essential Japanese sentence patterns, first by giving equivalents in English, then following with Japanese translations. Each pattern is accompanied by a concise, easy-to-follow explanation and several Japanese example sentences that demonstrate its usage. In addition, practice sections for each pattern allow the student to test his or her understanding of the material presented.Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication is organized into twelve chapters according to communicative function, including such tasks as making simple, declarative statements about people and things in the world; making comparisons; talking about events in the past, present and future; expressing desire, conjecture and intention;stating causes or reasons; making requests; asking and giving permission; and using the passive and causative-passive voices. Extensive charts at the back of the book outline the rules for inflecting and conjugating adjectives and verbs-essential to fluent communication.

    In the course of the narrative, the townspeople of Wali face the moments that have defined China's history during the latter part of the twentieth century: the land reform programs, the famine of 1959-1961, the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and the Cultural Revolution. Translated into English for the very first time, The Ancient Ship is a revolutionary work of Chinese fiction that speaks to people across the globe.

    Here conformity is valued above all else, and suspicion governs every exchange among neighbors, classmates, and even friends. Into this stifling atmosphere comes a tall, clean-shaven teacher from Shanghai, wearing an elegant gray wool jacket and carrying an English dictionary under his arm.With the dictionary as his disposal, Love Liu turns to it for answers to his most pressing questions about love and life, and a whole new world opens up for him. His classmates-the bright, troubled Sunrise Huang and the rowdy, impoverished Garbage Li-also find hope in the unfamiliar and tantalizing sounds of English, but in an atmosphere of accusation and recrimination, one in which their teacher is deemed morally suspect and mere innuendo can cost someone his life, their ideals face a test more challenging than any they'll take in the classroom.A major bestseller in China, where it was voted best novel of the year independently by the critics and the general public, English is a transcendent novel about the power of language to launch a journey of self-discovery.

    Along the way we meet Communist rioters, ultraviolent gangsters, stallholders at the city’s many covered markets, pop singers enmeshed in the high-stakes machinery of star-making, and a people always caught in the shifting balance of political power, whether in London or Beijing.A gripping and brilliantly constructed novel from a talented new voice in crime fiction, The Borrowed paints a dynamic portrait of Hong Kong and reveals just how closely the past and present are connected in this fascinating city.

    Two people who are close together like siblings, poking honeycombs and getting stung by bees together, stealing sweet potatoes and getting beaten together. By the time the two would look back, only then would they realize that the friendship from long ago has slowly blossomed into love.The other one is the “sees and hates each other” type. Two people who opposes the other with equal intensity, already itching to rush ahead to bite the other when spotted from a distance. When they get the chance, they’d pull the tire valve of each other’s bikes. But later on, when the two would grow up, they would suddenly realize — ah! this is true love.Unfortunately, Jiang Chen and I are neither of the above mentioned. In a very long time, me and him were simply just neighbors who live across each other. Him playing his piano daily, me watching Chibi Maruko-chan with gusto. Occasionally, when I forget the content in our homework, I would press the doorbell of their house. He would always mock me, and impatiently ask why I didn’t remember.Probably, because I’m seeking out a favor, so I never bickered with him. Of course, it might also be because I don’t like to argue with people since young. I’m someone calm and collected, a little bit extraordinarily

    During the next four decades, Wang Qiyao indulges in the decadent pleasures of pre-liberation Shanghai, secretly playing mahjong during the antirightist Movement and exchanging lovers on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Surviving the vicissitudes of modern Chinese history, Wang Qiyao emerges in the 1980s as a purveyor of "old Shanghai"--a living incarnation of a new, commodified nostalgia that prizes splendor and sophistication--only to become embroiled in a tragedy that echoes the pulpy Hollywood noirs of her youth.From the violent persecution of communism to the liberalism and openness of the age of reform, this sorrowful tale of old China versus new, of perseverance in the face of adversity, is a timeless rendering of our never-ending quest for transformation and beauty.

    One by one, over a hundred men and women are forced by the harsh feudal officialdom to take to the hills. They band together and defeat every attempt of the government troops to crush them. Within this framework we find intrigue, adventure, murder, warfare, romance ... in a connected series of fascinating individual tales, told in the suspenseful manner of the traditional storyteller.

    Never before had a fiction writer dealt with the Cultural Revolution in such Daoist-Confucian terms, discarding Mao-speak, and mixing both traditional and vernacular elements with an aesthetic that emphasized not the hardships and miseries of those years, but the joys of close, meaningful friendships. In The King of Chess, a student’s obsession with finding worthy chess opponents symbolizes his pursuit of the dao; in The King of Children—made into an award-winning film by Chen Kaige, the director of Farewell My Concubine—an educated youth is sent to teach at an impoverished village school where one boy’s devotion to learning is so great he is ready to spend 500 days copying his teacher’s dictionary; and in the title novella a peasant’s innate connection to a giant primeval tree takes a tragic turn when a group of educated youth arrive to clear the mountain forest. The King of Trees is a masterpiece of world literature, full of passion and noble emotions that stir the inner chambers of the heart.

    Traveling from his rural home in Freshwind to the city of Xi’an, Happy brings only an eternally positive attitude, his devoted best friend Wufu, and a pair of high-heeled women’s shoes he hopes to fill with the love of his life.In Xi’an, Happy and Wufu find jobs as trash pickers sorting through the city’s filth, but Happy refuses to be deterred by inauspicious beginnings. In his eyes, dusty birds become phoenixes, the streets become rivers, and life is what you make of it. When he meets the beautiful Yichun, he imagines she is the one to fill the shoes and his Cinderella-esque dream. But when the harsh city conditions and the crush of societal inequalities take the life of his friend and shake Happy to his soul, he’ll need more than just his unrelenting optimism to hold on to the belief that something better is possible.

    Part sweet songs of unseen birds and part cautionary tales, this abecedarium fully lives up to the epithet "eclectic."

    Comprised of three novellas, "The Golden Age," "East Palace, West Palace," and "2015," this book is the first English translation of his work."East Palace, West Palace," one of the first contemporary Chinese fictional works dealing with male homosexuality, is an S/M-oriented love story between a masochistic gay writer and a handsome policeman unaware of his sadistic tendencies. In "The Golden Age," for which Wang Xiaobo is perhaps best known, the protagonist, Wang Er (literally, Wang number two) is a city student sent to the countryside for rustification during the Cultural Revolution. There he meets a lovely young doctor whom he encourages to live up to her undeserved reputation as "damaged goods." In "2015," another Wang Er, after being put into a labor camp for practicing painting without a license, becomes the love object of a sadistic policewoman.Although the sexual and social roles of Wang Xiaobo's characters intertwine, sexuality functions not as protest but as an absurd metaphor for state power and the voluntary, even enthusiastic, collaboration of those subject to it. Full of deadpan humor and oddball sex, Wang Xiaobo's novellas allow us to see, through a subtly shifting kaleidoscope, scenes from the elaborate dance the individual must do with the state in twentieth-century China.