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This graphic novel traces the development of the modern Chinese state while the author chronicles the trials and tribulations of the Chinese everyman as he embraces the new order in childhood, serves in the military and with agricultural labor, and becomes a member of the Communist Party.
Deborah Fallows has spent a lot of her life learning languages and traveling around the world. But nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying learning the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering behavior and habits of its people, and its culture's conundrums. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language - a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar - became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and the overflowing humanity of modern China. Fallows learned, for example, that the abrupt, blunt way of speaking which Chinese people sometimes use isn't rudeness, but is, in fact a way to acknowledge and honor the closeness between two friends. She learned that English speakers' trouble with hearing or saying tones-the variations in inflection that can change a word's meaning-is matched by Chinese speakers' inability not to hear tones, or to even take a guess at understanding what might have been meant when foreigners misuse them. Dreaming in Chinese is the story of what Deborah Fallows discovered about the Chinese language, and how that helped her make sense of what had at first seemed like the chaos and contradiction of everyday life in China.
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.
China has undergone a remarkable process of urbanization, but a significant portion of its citizens still live in rural villages. To gain better access to jobs, health care, and consumer goods, villagers often travel or migrate to cities, and that cyclical transit and engagement with new technoscientific and medical practices is transforming village life. In this thoughtful ethnography, Gonçalo Santos paints a richly detailed portrait of one rural township in Guangdong Province, north of the industrialized Pearl River Delta region. Unlike previous studies of rural-urban relations and migration in China, Chinese Village Life Today—based on Santos’s more than twenty years of field research—starts from a rural community’s point of view rather than the perspective of major urban centers. Santos considers the intimate choices of village families in the face of larger forces of modernization, showing how these negotiations shape the configuration of daily village life, from marriage, childbirth, and childcare to personal hygiene and public sanitation. Santos also outlines the advantages of a rural existence, including a degree of autonomy over family planning and community life that is rare in urban China. Filled with vivid anecdotes and keen observations, this book presents a fresh perspective on China’s urban-rural divide and a grounded theoretical approach to rural transformation.
Born in 1941, Tubten Khétsun is a nephew of the Gyatso Tashi Khendrung, one of the senior government officials taken prisoner after the Tibetan peoples' uprising of March 10, 1959. Khétsun himself was arrested while defending the Dalai Lama's summer palace, and after four years in prisons and labor camps, he spent close to two decades in Lhasa as a requisitioned laborer and "class enemy." In this eloquent autobiography, Khétsun describes what life was like during those troubled years. His account is one of the most dispassionate, detailed, and readable firsthand descriptions yet published of Tibet under the Communist occupation. Khétsun talks of his prison experiences as well as the state of civil society following his release, and he offers keenly observed accounts of well-known events, such as the launch of the Cultural Revolution, as well as lesser-known aspects of everyday life in occupied Lhasa. Since Communist China continues to occupy Tibet, the facts of this era remain obscure, and few of those who lived through it have recorded their experiences at length. Khétsun's story will captivate any reader seeking a refreshingly human account of what occurred during the Maoists' shockingly brutal regime.
A woman who spent more than six years in solitary confinement during Communist China's Cultural Revolution discusses her time in prison. Reissue. A New York Times Best Book of the Year.
"Sweet and Sour" examines the history of Chinese family restaurants in the U. S. and Canada. Why did many Chinese immigrants enter this business around the end of the 19th century? What conditions made it possible for Chinese to open and succeed in operating restaurants after they emigrated to North America? How did Chinese restaurants manage to attract non-Chinese customers, given that they had little or no acquaintance with the Chinese style of food preparation and many had vicious hostility toward Chinese immigrants? The goal of "Sweet and Sour" is to understand how the small Chinese family restaurants functioned. Narratives provided by 10 Chinese who grew up in their family restaurants in all parts of the North America provide valuable insights on the role that this ethnic business had on their lives. Is there any future for this type of immigrant enterprise in the modern world of franchised and corporate owned eateries or will it soon, like the Chinese laundry, be a relic of history? Excerpts from Reviews I greatly admired and enjoyed "Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants" It does an excellent job of going over the historical background on early U. S. Chinese restaurants, unearthing lots of material new to me. And the interviews of Chinese restaurateurs opened up a whole new side to the story, of what it was like to work and live in these restaurants. Andrew Cole, "Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States" "Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants" tackles the long-neglected topic of Chinese food with a focus on Chinese restaurants. This well-researched, thoughtfully conceptualized monograph brings academic rigor and adds historical depth, as well as the perspectives of an insightful scholar and a second-generation Chinese American, to our understanding of the development of Chinese food in the realm of public consumption in the United States and Canada. It promises to elevate that understanding to a higher level... Through this book, I hope, consumers at the ubiquitous Chinese restaurants can also gain a deeper appreciation of historical forces and human experiences that have shaped the food they now enjoy. Yong Chen, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine. "San Francisco Chinese 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community." "Sweet and Sour" covers many important aspects of the Chinese restaurant business and it is a great contribution to the study of Chinese food in America. This area really deserves more attention than it has had. Haiming Liu, Prof.Ethnic & Women's Studies, Calif. State Polytechnic Univ. Pomona. I am reading your delightful book, Sweet and Sour. I especially like the "Insider Perspectives" section. Those first-hand experiences can generate a lot of potentially testable hypotheses about how the Chinese were able to provision their remote restaurants with exotic ingredients while other ethnic groups could not. Susan B. Carter, Univ. of California, Riverside Reader Comments You've made some amazing observations, wrote them down with sincerity, and I wholeheartedly support you on it. You've brought back some fond memories and I'm sure it will touch other folks like myself that have gone through it. Dave Chow When reading Sweet and Sour, I was struck by how it is both a work of scholarship and a documentation of the experience of Chinese restaurant workers. It serves to teach us about their experiences on multiple levels. Heather Lee Brings back childhood memories as most of the people interviewed are from Toisan like my family. We could always go into a new town, drop in at a Chinese restaurant and be welcomed. Dad would run out and say, "they're cousins! Rosemary Eng
For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.
Offering an introduction to religion in contemporary China, the essays in this volume consider many diverse themes including religion in urban, rural and ethnic minority settings and the historical, sociological, economic and political aspects of religion on the country as a whole.