50books_poc | Entries tagged with chinese

sairaali.livejournal.com

I'm awful at doing writeups, so this list has just been sitting on my desktop for ages making me feel guilty for not doing writeups.

Soo, I will just put the list up with brief one-liners on whether I liked it or not, and I'd be happy to discuss more in comments.

5) Silver Pheonix by Cindy Pon
Fantasy, adventure, romance, dragons, goddesses, intrigue! What's not to love?

6) Bodies in Motion by Maryanne Mohanraj
This is more of a series of interrelated short stories than a novel. The stories follow three generations of two families who immigrate from Sri Lanka to the US. It portrays a mix of different immigrant experiences, although nearly all of the characters are solidly middle or upper-middle class. The style is very ethereal and dreamy.

7) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
This has been reviewed here a million times. I enjoyed it, but found the casual sexism a bit grating.

8) My Life as a Rhombus by Varian Johnson
If I thought Oscar Wao had a few problematic scenes wrt to gender, holy wow, it was nothing compared to this. Neither the narrator nor any of the characters question the basic assumption that a woman needs a man to love her and that only a domineering man could possibly handle loving a strong independent woman. The story itself was well crafted and tightly written, but I couldn't get past the sexism.

9) Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor
Love! A young girl with the ability to speak to shadows struggles with her community's distrust and fear of female Shadow Speakers, a result of her estranged father's dictatorial and regressive policies. When her father is publicly beheaded, her world is turned inside out, and she embarks on a quest of self-discovery that takes her far away from home, during which she discovers a major military plot against her home.

Girls with cat eyes! Talking camels! Magic plants that grow into houses! A girl meets a strange orphan boy with his own powers and secrets on her quest without a queasy romance subplot being introduced! Again, what's not to love?

10)And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women Ed: Muneez Shamshie
Definitely would recommend this. Like any anthology, some of the stories are so-so, some are fantastic.

And I know this comm is focused on books by POC, but I know there are a bunch of SFF fans here and I'd like to make some anti-recs. I found the following books at the $1 ARC sale at Wiscon, and I suggest giving them all a miss for skeevy race issues.
Stone Voice Rising by C Lee Tocci - pseudo-Natives with magic powers just for being Native, and also misappropriational mishmash of at least six different tribes' religious beliefs, that I could recognize. Kokopelli become Popokelli, a demented fae creature who betrays his species and sells out to the (literal) Devil.
Kop and Ex-Kop by Warren Hammond - Locals on a backwater economically depressed planet are being murdered by a serial killer from the orbiting space station, which has technology centuries advanced of what is available planetside. Oh and incidentally, all the space dwellers have perfect milky white skin and the planet dwellers are all dark. Bleck.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

27. Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding

A non-fiction, academic book, but very readable. Ko states that her intention is to present a study of footbinding that does not approach the subject moralistically; she's very good at that. However, she also writes that she wants to give the female perspective on footbinding, and I felt that she mostly failed in that attempt. Nearly every single source is from a male writer. The few female sources don't show up until the last chapter. I also would have liked to see more archaeological sources used, either of the actual preserved shoes, or information from graves, houses, etc. Though being an archaeologist, I may be predisposed to that source.

Anyway. Regardless of my problems with it, I mostly enjoyed this book. Ko does a very good job of showing that there was no such single thing as "footbinding". What the practice entailed, in terms of age begun, physical shaping (or not) of the foot, and the cultural meaning, changed continually across time and space. She also does a great job of showing that ending footbinding was in itself a cultural practice, which meant specific things to specific people. Overall, an interesting book, even if I wished it had used a wider range of sources.

Current Mood: cheerful

fiction-theory.livejournal.com

Title: Colors of the Mountain
Author: Da Chen (DaChen.org)
Genre: Non-fiction
Page Count: 320 pages
Publisher: Anchor

( Review: Colors of the Mountain )

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

A completely charming introduction to Chinese food culture, cooking theory, history, and folklore, thoroughly illustrated and told partly in comic book form.

I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the entire thing, but the material that I did recognize didn’t contradict what I already knew (except for the part that said that in America, tofu is sometimes used to make wedding cakes, which is probably true for some couple somewhere on cake wrecks), and the illustrations certainly have that meticulously researched look.

It begins with the discovery of cooking, when unhappy Early Men, often subject to stomach aches, find a burned goat after a forest fire: “Indeed, it smells good and it’s easy to chew, too.” The ensuing whirlwind tour of Chinese foodways touches on Confucius’s ten perfections of Chinese cuisine (like many key terms, these are helpfully shown in hanzi as well as English), banquet etiquette, superstitions and songs about chopsticks, regional cuisine, which foods should not be eaten together, and a great many anecdotes in comic book form about the origin of various foods, including one in which the ubiquitous Zhuge Liang improves his soldiers’ morale via a meat dumpling shaped like an enemy’s head. (There’s another story in which a guy shapes dough into the form of a tyrannical minister and fries it.)

Many of the food origin stories follow this pattern: Political problem; new dish invented; new dish cures ailing person, improves morale, or is used to metaphorically illuminate the political situation; political problem solved!

Yi Yin once carried his cooking utensils and used cooking methods and flavorings to persuade King Cheng Tang to take up leadership of the state and successfully overthrow the corrupt Xia Dynasty.

Comic book Yi Yin, magisterial: “Every food item has unique qualities. You are only the king of a small state. You can’t possibly sample all of the delicacies of this great land. You have to take control of all China, and become the emperor to possess everything.

A tremendously entertaining read in its own right, but also an excellent springboard for further study of Chinese food culture.

Check it out on Amazon: Origins Of Chinese Food Culture

puritybrown.livejournal.com

11: Scott Pilgrim Vs The Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Graphic novel; number five in the Scott Pilgrim series. I wrote this up on my comics blog.

12: Village of Stone by Xiaolu Guo

An earlier work by the author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, which I adored. This is a very different kind of novel: short, stark and painful, though ultimately optimistic. The protagonist, Coral, remembers her early life in a remote fishing village: raised by her grandparents in the absence of her parents, she was left to her own devices a great deal, and suffered terrible sexual abuse at a young age. The harshness of life in the Village of Stone is expertly portrayed, as is the effect all of that suffering has on Coral herself. Coral is a survivor; she's strong; but she's wounded, and gives the impression of not wanting to feel too much or think too deeply, lest she jar the wounded places inside her.

The style is rather different from A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, probably because this novel was originally written in Chinese and translated by Cindy Carter, but also, I think, because the subject matter is different and requires a sparser, more pared-back style. It's difficult to read sometimes because the events described are so unpleasant, but an excellent novel and well worth the effort.

(I've found this interview with Guo about the novel. Hey, she makes films too! That's something to look out for

12films_poc.)

icecreamempress.livejournal.com

(From my book-a-day Twitter reviews, which you can find at booktweeting.)

( Read more... )

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

I first learned many of the legends and historical incidents of India by reading Amar Chitra Katha comics, so this graphic novel struck me as the perfect introduction to Romance of the Three Kingdoms when I saw it in Taiwan.

It is now several years and reading attempts later. Now that I’ve also seen Red Cliff, I think that is a better introduction if you have no previous familiarity with the story. (My previous familiarity could be summed up as, "It's a classic Chinese historical novel about the three kingdoms of China. It has lots of war and strategy.")

This is no knock on the comic book, which is a truly valiant effort to condense an enormous text into a single - and slim - graphic novel. Amar Chitra Katha’s Mahabharata was something like forty issues long, and probably would have been much more confusing if I wasn’t already familiar with Indian names and had additional exposure to the story via the Doordarshan miniseries (which is about 100 episodes long.)

Though there are many entertaining moments, I am still completely confused and forget who most of the bazillion characters are, except for the ones who were also in Red Cliff. I’m sure eventually I’ll become sufficiently familiar with Chinese names that this will be less of a problem for me, but it did not help that not only did everyone have their regular names, they also had courtesy names. It reminded me of when I was reading Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles for the first time, and I went through the entire book thinking that “Sir Walter Scott” and “Buccleuch” were two different people rather than the singular Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch.

On the positive side, the graphic novel has lots of decapitations (including one of a very startled-looking horse—poor horse!), done in a cartoony style with people shouting “Die!” This is something which I never fail to enjoy.

A few more highlights:

-Cao Cao claiming that he wasn’t trying to assassinate anyone, he was just giving him a sword!

-The caption “Zhuge Liang made his dazzling appearance.”

-Zhuge Liang’s totally awesome stratagem with the arrows and the straw bales.

-Huang Gai getting himself beat up for the greater good. I am certain John Woo will film this in a very slashy and fetishistic manner in Red Cliff 2, and I for one can’t wait.

-Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang writing “fire” on their palms. (Zhou Yu comes across really differently here than he does in the movie!)

-The chapter title “Zhou Yu Exasperated To Death.”

-Guan Yu playing chess while undergoing surgery.

-The hilariously large-assed illustration of Guan Yu on page 105 – even worse since he’s being decapitated at the time. It’s his tragic death scene, and I could look at were his enormous, globular ass cheeks.

-Zhuge Liang winning a battle after his own death.

whereweather.livejournal.com

#13. Three Chinese Poets: Translations of poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu, translated by Vikram Seth
1992, HarperCollins

Here is an interesting double play: a collection of poems by three Tang Dynasty Chinese poets, translated into English by Indian poet and novelist Vikram Seth.

I had not known Seth spoke Chinese (though looking it up on the Internet, apparently everybody else did: he is "a famous polyglot" who speaks German, Welsh and French as well as Hindi, Urdu, Mandarin and English, and one of his early award-winning books was a travel narrative through Muslim China and Tibet (From Heaven Lake, 1983, in case you were wondering)). In fact, I had not known much about Seth at all except what I decided/learned/concluded from reading about the first third of Golden Gate, his amazingly ambitious and eccentric verse novel about San Francisco, late one night when someone left it in the grad-student work room while I was procrastinating on writing my thesis. From reading this I concluded that Seth appeals to me. I like his playfulness, his eccentricity -- his standing-outside-of-the-orbitness; at the same time, his obvious irregular but snooty attachment to the Established. (Not that this is a universally admirable trait, but it's something I share, so I recognized myself in it.) I like his queer sensibility, his flashes of nastiness blurred with a deep attempt to reach for compassion and humanity. I like his baroque attachment to rhyme, which I also have and which is not very popular these days -- is very risky, also, because unsuccessful free verse is just boring, but unsuccessful rhymed verse descends into doggerel, which makes me sometimes too nervous even to make the attempt.

I think some of Seth's translations here are successful, and some of them really aren't. (Which is okay, right?) He has taken the -- to me -- very surprising approach of trying to translate the poems in metered and rhymed English versions; they are, in fact, metered and rhymed in Chinese, but of course the process of translation complicated everything... I feel like this inevitably puts such a personal stamp on the end results that in this entry I'm tagging Seth as the author, _as well as_ the translator. (Eccentric, maybe, but... so? Seth is eccentric; he makes me feel like eccentricity.) Even though, I should note in fairness, Seth gives the disclaimer that his translations "are not intended as transcreations or free translations" à la Ezra Pound.

( Though you are kind enough to ask... )

cyphomandra.livejournal.com

Ip is a professor of Asian Studies at Auckland University, and she’s written a number of books about the Chinese experience in New Zealand/Aotearoa; this one is a collection of interviews with members of seven Māori -Chinese families, loosely grouped in order of the earliest Chinese arrival (1920s – Chinese were arriving in NZ almost 100 years earlier, but my understanding is that this was largely in gold-mining areas in the South Island where there were far fewer Māori, and none of the families are from there). The interviews were also conducted around the time of the 2002 NZ government’s apology for the poll tax only Chinese immigrants had to pay (10 pounds initially, increased to 100 pounds in 1896 when “too many” Chinese were still getting in, with subsequent legislation adding in an English test and denying permanent residency), which was seen as a major step forward by the NZ Chinese community.

( Being Māori-Chinese: Mixed Identities. )

Anyway. I thought this was interesting, and although it is highly selective in terms of experiences, it also obviously fits into the broader context of Ip’s work – her latest book, The Dragon and the Taniwha, is an edited collection with a wide range of authors that includes quite a bit more historical detail, including the pre-1900s period.

fiction-theory.livejournal.com

Note: I hope it's okay that I posted a small picture of the cover. I do that for the reviews I do on my own LJ so that it can help people who might want to find the book in a bookstore. I know that sometimes I can't remember the name/title of a book but will remember what the cover art looked like.

Also, the CoC/GLBT/Gender scores are also something I do for all the books I review, because I find that it helps me with intersectionality, and it also lets readers who, for instance, might want to know if a book (however well written) is going to insult them as a queer person or a person of color, or if it's a safe book for them. If that's inappropriate for this community, please let me know and I will edit my review or take it down all together. I expect that my ratings may not be as high or low as some would prefer and I do not mind anyone disagreeing with me! I always love talking about books and debating the finer points of them.

ETA 2: This review contains spoilers for this book.

Title: Waiting
Author: Ha Jin
Genre: Fiction
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Vintage

( Review: Waiting )

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

11. Henry Chang, Chinatown Beat

Jack was born and grew up in New York City's Chinatown, and now that he's an adult, he's back in the neighborhood working as a cop; Johnny is a new Chinese immigrant with little to no English, working as a hired driver; Mona is also a recent Chinese immigrant, brought to NYC by Uncle Four, an older man involved with powerful gangs, to be his mistress. This novel switches between these three characters' narrations, and is about what happens when they interact. It's not much of a mystery (since the reader always knows who did what), though it's definitely noir. The language is very chilly and the world is very bleak; I know these are pretty much the defining traits of noir, but they very much didn't work for me in this book. In fact, I was so uninvolved in it that I put it down and read several other books before finishing it, coming back to it only because I figured there were only 50 pages left, so I may as well finish it.

The other thing I disliked in this book is that every female character is portrayed, to one degree or another, as a pushy, grasping bitch (or, in few scenes, as a damsel in distress). It was quite grating by the third or fourth character (that's an understatement).

On the good side, I thought this book did do a very good job of describing the look and feel of NYC's Chinatown, and I really enjoyed reading about the way the different racial groups (particularly Chinese, black, and Hispanic) uneasily interacted with one another.

12. Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

I know everyone has already said this, but: So! Good!

This book is about Junior, a Native American teenager living on a Spokane reservation, who decides to go to an all-white high school in a nearby town. He draws cartoons, and the text of the book is accompanied by drawings (done by Ellen Forney). The story deals with Junior's choice to leave the reservation, how the other Indians react to that choice, particularly his best friend, Rowdy, and the way he is treated by the white students, teachers, and other adults at the school. Everything is complicated, and done with such detail and honesty. It's funny, really funny, but what I was most surprised by was how tragic the book was also. There's a lot of death, and bad choices, and tough realities in here. Very highly recommended.

Current Mood: cheerful

jain

8. Cao Guanlong, The Attic: Memoir of a Chinese Landlord's Son

I don't read many memoirs, but I really enjoyed this one. Cao writes about his life in Shanghai from the early '50s to late '80s and about his family's efforts to cope with poverty and to adjust to the shifting policies of the government. The writing style is strong and clear, and the incidents Cao writes about unite to form an engaging and engrossing narrative.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

I was away from the internet for most of the beginning of this year, and so I've written some short reviews for the books I read during that time. At the link are my reviews of:

1. Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque
2. Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After
3. Shereen Ratnagar, Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze Age
4. Dalai Lama, How to Practice
5. Lalita Tademy, Cane River
6. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
7. Wendy Lee, Happy Family
8. Randa Abdel-Fattah, Does My Head Look Big In This?

All reviews here!

I enjoyed all of them, but the short summary is: if you only read one, I recommend Does My Head Look Big In This?

Current Mood: cheerful

sumofparts.livejournal.com

Haven't posted or read in a long while.

Here's my latest book post.

Re the tags: her bio on her website says she lives in both the US and China, not if she's a citizen but I tagged this as "chinese-american" and "asian-american" anyway. The story however takes place almost entirely in China.

sanguinity

42. Thomas Fink and Yong Mao, The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie.

The first third of this slim volume is the history of male neckwear, including such factoids as how the terracotta army turned necktie scholarship on its ear, what the first verse of Yankee Doodle is about, and that while the Duke of Windsor's characteristically large knot can be emulated with a so-called Windsor knot, the Duke himself wore padded ties. (That last makes me snicker every time I repeat it; I keep wanting to make a joke about him stuffing his tie with kleenex.)

From there the book goes into a fast overview of knots in the topological sense (in which we learn that the four-in-hand is a buntline hitch), and a prose description of the authors' definition of a "legal" necktie knot. (Much to my disappointment, the eighty-five knots in the title are not a cataloging of all the possible ways to put a knot in a tie, but all the possible ways to build a "respectable" knot, something you might be willing to wear to a job interview. In this case, "respectability" includes somewhat-arbitrary limits on a knot's symmetry and maximum size.) For those who are frustrated by prose descriptions of mathematics, the mathematical details are included in an appendix; for those who do not want to deal with the formal mathematics, the formal mathematics has been placed well out of your way in the appendix.

And then we get to the knots themselves. All eighty-five possible knots are described in notation and diagrams, and the history of the most-aesthetic few in each class (as defined by the mathematics) is discussed. Throughout this section there are many photos of famous people wearing neckties, but unfortunately, the particular knot used in any given photo is almost never identified. While reading all these detailed descriptions of the final forms of the twenty-odd most popular knots, I very much wanted side-by-side standardized photos. (Mostly because I doubt. Are they really as distinctive as all that?)

All in all, it's a readable little treatise that demonstrates how one can define a solution space for a not-so-abstract problem. Back in my pure-math combinatorics days, I could see handing this off to someone who was trying to get a vague sense of what math "looks" like to mathematicians (or, similarly, for those who wanted a sample of what mathematicians "do"). It could also be nice browse-through for trivia hounds. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if its most frequent usage was as a coming-of-age gift for a young person who was learning to tie his or her first necktie.