Book picks similar to
Practice Makes Perfect Basic Chinese by Feng-Hsi Liu


chinese
learn-chinese
languages-and-linguistics
languages-modern-rest-of-world

Paper Wife


Laila Ibrahim - 2018
    Desperate to secure her future, Mei Ling’s parents arrange a marriage to a widower in California. To enter the country, she must pretend to be her husband’s first wife—a paper wife.On the perilous voyage, Mei Ling takes an orphan girl named Siew under her wing. Dreams of a better life in America give Mei Ling the strength to endure the treacherous journey and detainment on Angel Island. But when she finally reaches San Francisco, she’s met with a surprise. Her husband, Chinn Kai Li, is a houseboy, not the successful merchant he led her to believe.Mei Ling is penniless, pregnant, and bound to a man she doesn’t know. Her fragile marriage is tested further when she discovers that Siew will likely be forced into prostitution. Desperate to rescue Siew, she must convince her husband that an orphan’s life is worth fighting for. Can Mei Ling find a way to make a real family—even if it’s built on a paper foundation?

Young Babylon


Lu Nei - 2014
    At age nineteen in 1990s China, he feels pressure to follow suit with those around him and takes a job at the town’s saccharin factory. Slowly, he adjusts to the bureaucratic factory routine, making the best of the situation by bonding with coworkers, flirting with girls, and refusing to give in completely to the expectations of those around him.As Lu Xiaolu finds his way, a startling portrait of an economically expanding China comes into view; the propaganda of a common goal gives way to a bottom-line system that he sees as indifferent to individual happiness. But thanks to the relationships he develops, Lu Xiaolu decides to fight for the life he wants.

Little Aunt Crane


Geling Yan - 2008
    As the Chinese move in, the elders of the Japanese settler village of Sakito decide to preserve their honour by killing all the villagers in an act of mass suicide. Only 16-year-old Tatsuru escapes.But Tatsuru's trials have just begun. As she flees, she falls into the hands of human traffickers. She is sold to a wealthy Chinese family, where she becomes Duohe - the clandestine second wife to the only son, and the secret bearer of his children. Against all odds, Duohe forms an unlikely friendship with the first wife Xiaohuan, united by the unshakeable bonds of motherhood and family.Spanning several tumultuous decades of Mao’s rule, Little Aunt Crane is a novel about love, bravery and survival, and how humanity endures in the most unlikely of circumstances.

1988:我想和這個世界談談


Han Han - 2010
    (#11 Nancy Pelosi, #14 Michelle Obama). His new novel "1988: I want to have a talk with the world" traces his road trip on highway 318, redefines "on the road" novel with his opinions in dialogues between his characters on the road. In Chinese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

Pavilion of Women


Pearl S. Buck - 1946
    The House of Wu, one of the oldest and most revered in China, is thrown into an uproar by her decision, but Madame Wu will not be dissuaded and arranges for a young country girl to come take her place in bed. Elegant and detached, Madame Wu orchestrates this change as she manages everything in the extended household of more than sixty relatives and servants. Alone in her own quarters, she relishes her freedom and reads books she has never been allowed to touch. When her son begins English lessons, she listens, and is soon learning from the foreigner, a free-thinking priest named Brother Andre, who will change her life. Few books raise so many questions about the nature and roles of men and women, about self-discipline and happiness.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane


Lisa See - 2017
    For the Akha people, ensconced in ritual and routine, life goes on as it has for generations—until a stranger appears at the village gate in a jeep, the first automobile any of the villagers has ever seen. Slowly, Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, begins to reject the customs that shaped her early life. When she has a baby out of wedlock she rejects the tradition that would compel her to give the child over to be killed, and instead leaves her, wrapped in a blanket with a tea cake tucked in its folds, near an orphanage in a nearby city. As Li-yan comes into herself, leaving her village for an education, a business, and city life, her daughter, Haley, is raised in California by loving adoptive parents. Despite her privileged childhood, Haley wonders about her origins. Across the ocean Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. Over the course of years, each searches for meaning in the study of Pu’er, the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for centuries.

Marrow


Yan Lianke - 1998
    In the story, a mother takes extreme measures to provide her four mentally disabled children with a normal life. She feeds them a medicinal soup made from the bones of her dead husband when she finds out that bones 'the closer from kin the better' can cure their illness. When she runs out of her husband's bones, she resorts to a measure that only a mother can take.

Old Tales Retold 故事新编


Lu Xun - 1936
    The main content of ""Classic Echo: New Stories (English-Chinese)"" consists of preamble, sky healing, flying to the moon, water, plucking, swords, out customs, non-attack.

Beautiful Country


J.R. Thornton - 2016
    He discovers a country in transition; a society in which the dual systems of Communist Era state control and an emerging entrepreneurial culture exist in paradox.A top ranked junior tennis player in the U.S., Chase joins the practices of the Beijing National Junior Tennis Team and is immersed in the brutal, cut-throat world of Chinese sport. It is a world in which gifted children are selected at the ages of six or seven for specialized sport schools where they devote their entire youth to the pursuit of athletic excellence and are paid as professionals by the state. Athletes find themselves compelled to do anything possible to succeed—right or wrong. Those who fail to reach the pinnacle are cast aside and are left facing a desperate future without hope.In China, Chase gains access to a culture rarely open to Westerners, and soon finds himself caught up in secrets. When his closest friend and teammate turns to him for help, Chase is faced with the dilemma of what to do when friendship, rules, and morals are in conflict.

The Dragon Syndicates: The Global Phenomenon of the Triads


Martin Booth - 1999
    From San Francisco to Amsterdam to Bangkok to Johannesburg, everywhere, everyday, the Triads are turning crimes like extortion, gambling, international prostitution, illegal immigrant smuggling, money laundering, fraud, corruption, arms, and narcotics into vast profits. This comprehensive history of the Triads traces their evolution over more than two thousand years from obscure parochial Chinese brotherhoods to an international criminal organization. It examines the archaic quasi-religious rituals that have for centuries bound the members of this now global fraternity. It recounts the exploits of patriots and outlaws. It explores the Triads' instigation of the Tong Wars in America, their collaboration with the Allies against the Japanese in Malaya, their collusion with the CIA in Vietnam. It chronicles their escalation of the heroin trade to Europe and the United States. It shocks, and it compels.

Sunzi Speaks: The Art of War


Tsai Chih Chung - 1994
    A profoundly wise and humorous rendering of the classic Chinese text on military strategy, as told through the delightful Chinese cartoon panels of best-selling author Tsai Chih Chung.

The Language Hoax


John McWhorter - 2014
    Russian has separate terms for dark and light blue. Does this mean that Russians perceive these colors differently from Japanese people? Does language control and limit the way we think, such that each language gives its speakers a different "worldview"?This short, opinionated book addresses the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which argues that the language we speak shapes the way we perceive the world. Linguist John McWhorter argues that while this idea is mesmerizing, it is plainly wrong. Cultural differences are quite real. However, the way languages' grammar world, and the random ways that their vocabularies happen to describe the world—whether time is expresses with vertical expressions instead of horizontal ones, whether a language happens to have a word for stick out or wipe—do not correspond to its speakers' experience of living. The fact that a language has only one word for eat, drink and smoke—as many do— doesn't mean its speakers don't process the differences between food and beverages as vividly as other people, and those who use the same word for blue and green perceive those two colors just as vividly as others do. McWhorter shows not only how the idea of language as a lens fails but also why we want so badly to believe it: we're eager to celebrate diversity by acknowledging the intelligence of peoples who may not think like we do. Though well-intentioned, our belief in this idea poses an obstacle to a better understanding of human nature and even trivializes the people we seek to celebrate. The reality—that all humans think alike—provides another, better way for us to acknowledge the intelligence of all peoples.

The Japanese Have a Word for It


Boyé Lafayette de Mente - 1997
    The co mpanion will interest tourists, students and business travel lers to Japan. '

The Drunkard


Liu Yichang - 1962
    It has been called the Hong Kong Novel, and was first published in 1962 as a serial in a Hong Kong evening paper. As the unnamed Narrator, a writer at odds with a philistine world, sinks to his drunken nadir, his plight can be seen to represent that of a whole intelligentsia, a whole culture, degraded by the brutal forces of history: the Second Sino-Japanese War and the rampant capitalism of post-war Hong Kong.The often surrealistic description of the Narrator's inexorable descent through the seedy bars and night-clubs of Hong Kong, of his numerous encounters with dance-girls and his ever more desperate bouts of drinking, is counterpointed by a series of wide-ranging literary essays, analysing the Chinese classical tradition, the popular culture of China and the West, and the modernist movement in Western and Chinese literature.The ambiance of Hong Kong in the early 1960s is graphically evoked in this powerful and poignant novel, which takes the reader to the very heart of Hong Kong. Hong Kong director Freddie Wong made a fine film version of the novel in 2004.

Foyle's Philavery


Christopher Foyle - 2007
    Some of these words appeal because of their aptness, some for their obscurity, some for their euphony, and some for their quirkiness.