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Heralded as a literary masterpiece and a best-seller in the Chinese-speaking world, The Great Flowing River is a personal account of the history of modern China and Taiwan unlike any other. In this eloquent autobiography, the noted scholar, writer, and teacher Chi Pang-yuan recounts her youth in mainland China and adulthood in Taiwan. Chi’s remarkable life, told in rich and striking detail, humanizes the eventful and turbulent times in which she lived. The Great Flowing River begins as a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of China’s war with Japan. Chi depicts her childhood in pre-occupation Manchuria and gives an eyewitness account of life in China during the war with Japan. S...
Through the keen eyes and curious mind of a young girl, Ying-tzu, we are given a glimpse into the adult world of Peking in the 1920s. The five sequential stories in this collection can be read as either stand-alone pieces, or as a novel, due to the cleverly constructed themes and character development. Exploring ideas of loss and bewilderment, Lin Hai-yin carefully captures the transition from childhood to adulthood. Shielded by a child's innocence, we are taken on a journey of discovery as Ying-tzu grapples with the uncertainties of human relationships as well as her developing awareness of the world around her. Poignant and poetic, it is hard not to be moved by Memories of Peking: South Side Stories."
"... an important contribution to the study of recent Chinese literature." -- Choice "This fine, scholarly survey of Chinese literature since 1949... discusses such trends as modernism, nativism, realism, root-seeking and 'scar' literature, 'misty' poets, and political, feminist, and societal issues in modern Chinese literature." -- Library Journal This volume is a survey of modern Chinese literature in the second half of the twentieth century. It has three goals: (1) to introduce figures, works, movements, and debates that constitute the dynamics of Chinese literature from 1949 to the end of the century; (2) to depict the enunciative endeavors, ranging from ideological treatises to avant-garde experiments, that inform the polyphonic discourse of Chinese cultural politics; (3) to observe the historical factors that enacted the interplay of literary (post)modernities across the Chinese communities in the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas.
Whampoa Military Academy was China's first modern military institution. For decades the "Spirit of Whampoa" was invoked as the highest praise to all Chinese soldiers who guarded their nation heroically. But of all the battles these soldiers have fought, the most challenging one was the civil war that resulted in the "great divide" of China in the mid-twentieth century. In 1949 the Communists exiled a million soldiers and their families to compounds in Taiwan and cut off communication with mainland China for forty years. The Last of the Whampoa Breed tells the stories of the exiles written by their descendants, many of whom have become Taiwan's most important authors. The book is an important...
"Pang Yuanji (1864-1949) was the collector from China with not only the largest number of high-quality antique paintings but also the most comprehensive and scholarly record of his collection. This is the first study that takes the innovative and unique approach to collection analysis by quantifying Pang's collection and comparing it to a selection of contemporaneous private collectors. In doing so, it shows how their tastes and interests were all shaped by the same Qing canon. More broadly, it explains that Pang did not merely absorb this canon, but then also purposefully and systematically used it and his collection to protect China's traditions into an uncertain future"--
A young girl forced to work in a Queens sweatshop calls child services on her mother in this powerful debut memoir about labor and self-worth that traces a Chinese immigrant's journey to an American future. As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family's garment factory in Queens. At home, she is treated as a maid and suffers punishment for doing her homework at night. Her mother wants to teach her a lesson: she is Chinese, not American, and such is their tough path in their new country. But instead of acquiescing, Qu alerts the Office of Children and Family Services, an act with consequences that impact the rest of her life. Nearly twenty years later, estranged from her mot...
China’s mid-twentieth-century wars pose extraordinary interpretive challenges. The issue is not just that the Chinese fought for such a long time—from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937 until the close of the Korean War in 1953—across such vast territory. As Hans van de Ven explains, the greatest puzzles lie in understanding China’s simultaneous external and internal wars. Much is at stake, politically, in how this story is told. Today in its official history and public commemorations, the People’s Republic asserts Chinese unity against Japan during World War II. But this overwrites the era’s stark divisions between Communists and Nationalists, increasingly erasing the c...
Based on extensive field research over a period of twenty years, this is the first comprehensive study of the Puyuma people of Taiwan. The Puyuma belong to the Austronesian peoples, which today number less than 370,000. In Taiwan, they are the least known of the aboriginal groups, numbering only 6000, and inhabiting the Southeastern province of Taitung. The study looks at the historical changes in the status and definition of these people in relation to the central state, the criteria by which people determine their own ethnic identity, and the evolution of that identity through history. The increasing awareness in the West of the importance of ethnic relations makes this an especially timely book.