50books_poc | Entries tagged with china

A "beautifully rendered" novel about war, migration, and the power of telling our stories, Peach Blossom Spring follows three generations of a Chinese family on their search for a place to call home.

A beautiful and heartbreaking read. The book followed 3 generations of a Chinese family as they searched for home. The story started in 1938 and went into current days and was told in multiple perspectives. There was a lot of hardship and heartbreak throughout, but it was the ending that got me right in the chest. I cried so hard during the final chapters and the way the book dealt with family history and all the things we end up leaving unsaid and get lost to time.

Content warnings for: ( Read more... )

opusculasedfera

The Ink-Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan translated by Jane Hirshfield, with Mariko Aratani
I'm deeply unqualified to judge classical Japanese poetry, but this seems like a pretty decent translation. I happened to read this one because it's the one the library had, which did make me wonder rather about why these particular poems and why these two authors were put in one volume and that sort of thing, but the translation sounds good and I assume these are the major poems of these two authors, though again, there's almost no context provided except a brief biography of the two poets. I don't really know what other translations are out there and I wouldn't not recommend this one, except that I kept wanting context, though I suppose it's a sign of a good poet-style (as opposed to academic-style) translation that I didn't need it for the individual poems which are largely unfootnoted and don't need said footnotes to be understandable as poems.

Suki by Suniti Namjoshi
This is half a memoir of the author's late cat and half discussion of meditation and I have to say that I found the bits about the cat more interesting. It's slight and charming, but might be a bit twee if you find people talking to their cats and having the cats answer back in English to be twee. Her insights into meditation/the personal insights she derives from meditation do feel like genuine insights, and yet I feel like I know so little about Namjoshi/the narrator that I don't actually care very much about her meditations on the origins of her personality. Cute cat anecdotes though.

Intimate Apparel/Fabulation: Two Plays by Lynn Nottage
These are two plays that deal in different ways with African-American women and the ways in which men take advantage of their achievements. The first is about a early 20th century seamstress in New York who corresponds with a labourer in Panama and ends up marrying him, and the second is about a successful businesswoman whose life is falling down around her after her husband steals all her money and fucks off, and how she returns to her family of origin in her distress. I don't really know how to talk about them because I found them both (they are, in a sense, time-separated mirrors of each other and that's why they're published as a single volume) excellent and yet they're both awfully depressing. I don't know that I'd want to go to see either of them played, and yet they both struck me as powerful and portraying their subject in a very clean, important way.

China in Ten Words by Yu Hua, translated by Allan H. Barr
The blurb claims that this book explains China through the lens of ten culturally important words. It doesn't. But what it is is memoir-essays with single word titles, and those are excellent. Yu Hua lived through the Cultural Revolution and served as a barefoot dentist (his term) for a while before beginning to write novels. He does a fantastic job of showing the degree to which children can be both unknowing about and culpable in societal brutality: in his case, during the Revolution. He also writes about how China has changed since then. An interesting perspective.

opusculasedfera

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley
An academic survey of a wide variety of types of texts that discuss FF eroticism/love in the Caribbean. Her argument is that a queer/wlw culture has always existed in the various Caribbean islands and that there is a local language in which one can talk about it, refuting claims that queerness is something imposed by Europeans or North Americans onto Caribbean people. I personally found the anthropological work done on actual communities of queer women more compelling than some of the literary analysis (and I like literary analysis!), but Tinsley does a great job of demonstrating how it all fits together. (Also her usage and analysis of terminology for these groups of women is way more detailed and thoughtful than I'm achieving in this capsule review, but I'm using queer to get the general point across.)

Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism by Umair Muhammad
A short book discussing how we need systemic change to solve the big problems of our time rather than individual action (e.g. switching out our power plants as a whole rather than everyone using slightly less energy individually). Not terribly original, but not a bad overview, and it might be useful as a book to give people who were just edging into the topic for the first time, though you'd probably want them to be at least somewhat receptive to leftist ideas. A bit marred by an afterword to this second edition that mostly consists of complaining about bell hooks' lack of relevance to third world women, which is a bit rich from a guy who talks about Marx all the time and doesn't mention gender at all in his own analysis, but the author is quite young and I hope he will grow out of it.

Holy Wild by Gwen Benaway
A collection of poetry, mostly about the author's experiences as a First Nations trans woman in Canada (specifically she's Anishinaabe and Metis). I highly recommend it and I'm looking forward to her collection of essays that is to be published later this year, but definitely trigger warnings for sexual and colonial violence throughout.

Transgender China ed. Howard Chiang*
A collection of academic papers that each cover some aspect of cross-gender activity in Chinese history. The topics range from oral history conducted among trans people in modern Hong Kong, to analyses of classic literature with gender-bending characters, to a paper that argues quite convincingly that eunuchs in China have always been socially considered men rather than a third sex or a genderbent alternate sex as they are sometimes represented in Western historiography. Interesting stuff, though definitely aimed at specialists more than the general audience.

*My interpretation of the rules here is that this collection, which is edited by a Taiwanese man and features many Chinese authors, is eligible for the challenge. However, some of the authors included are white, so I'm willing to defer to the group if there's disagreement on this question.

tags: non-fiction, poetry, china, south asia, anishinaabe, metis, caribbean

opusculasedfera

I've been keeping up with the challenge, but very bad about posting it anywhere. Let's see if I can change that this year as people come back to dreamwidth, maybe? (Please?)

Brief reviews:

A Burst of Light and other essays by Audre Lorde
A reread of the always magnificent Audre Lorde. I needed her essay on the uses of anger in this extremely trying time.

The Occasional Vegetarian: 100 Delicious Dishes that Put Vegetables in the Center of the Plate by Elaine Louie
Some excellent sounding recipes, some mediocre sounding recipes. Billed to me by the library catalogue as containing more essay than recipe, it was definitely the other way around, but if you want something new to do with a vegetable, this has a broad approach and recipes from a wide variety of food traditions. Tends to ignore the fact that even vegetarians need PROTEIN and heartiness/substance is not the same thing, which always annoys me a bit.

Following Fish: One Man's Journey into the Food and Culture of the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian
One of those books where someone travels somewhere and eats something delicious and describes it well. A solid example of the genre. Contains some excellent descriptions of fish cookery and Indian scenery, and some parts of India I know very little about. I enjoyed it, and Subramanian is much more aware that he's describing a delicious fried fish, not a deep secret of politics/society/life than the title makes it sound, which keeps the book light and compelling. If anyone has any more recs in this genre, I would be delighted to receive them.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump by Michiko Kakutani
An exploration of various historical antecedents to our current state of anything-goes political lies. Depressing as hell, but very good at the thing that it's doing.

Myth=Mithya: Decoding Hindu Mythology by Devdutt Pattanaik
An explanation of several Hindu myths as well as the personages/symbols within them. It took me months to finish this quite short volume so I kept getting the many, many names confused, but I don't think that was the author's fault. Does a good job with some myths at straightforwardly explaining how the same myth gets used to tell different lessons in different communities, but with other ones I was left feeling like there was a definite slant to the story and I was wondering whose story it was. On the other hand, it's not supposed to be a comprehensive guide, just a starting point, and I know that I'm not especially knowledgeable on the subject.

Tags: sri lanka, japan, african-american, india, china, food/cooking, mythology, politics, history, essay, non-fiction

sumofparts.livejournal.com

1. Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai
2. Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch by Dai Sijie (translated by Ina Rilke; white)
3. Six Suspects by Vikas Swarup
4. Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life by Bryan Lee O'Malley
5. The Circle of Reason by Amitav Ghosh

( Read more... )

tags: a: selvadurai shyam, a: dai sijie, w-t: rilke ina, a: swarup vikas, a: o'malley bryan lee, a: ghosh amitav, chinese, french, indian, canadian, sri lankan, novel, fiction, graphic novel, young adult, china, india, toronto, sri lanka, glbt, mysteryr

puritybrown.livejournal.com

46: The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

I find myself in two minds about this novel. It's undoubtedly a grand achievement: it takes an almost pointillist approach, building a picture of life in an industrial town in the People's Republic of China in 1979 by hopping around from character to character, showing us this person's daily routine, now this person's, now this person's; always letting us know something of their pasts, their hopes, their fears, and their illusions before moving on to the next one. The narrative voice is rather distant, and that's the only way something like this could have been made to work. If we were fully caught up in the minds of these characters, I expect the POV switches would have been wrenching and disorienting; the distance allows us to see all of what they do and feel and believe without getting lost.

I admired this novel; I enjoyed it. And yet while I turned the pages eagerly once I had the book in my hand, I didn't feel a need to go back to it once I'd put it down. There are a lot of momentous events in this novel, but -- perhaps because of the multitude of characters and the distant narrative voice -- there's not much sense of story. Things happen, one after the other, and you can even see the fuses being set (typically by accident, or otherwise unintentionally) that will end up being lit several chapters later. But for all that, I got the feeling that the omniscient narrator could continue to observe the inhabitants of Muddy River and tell me what they were doing and thinking and feeling for a hundred years without stopping. As I said, I don't think Li could have built and explored such a large cast of characters, and thereby created such a vivid sense of the complexity of the society she's writing about, without maintaining that narrative distance. But in making all of the characters equally important (even the ones who only appear for a paragraph), Li ends up making all of the events equally important as well, which leeches the novel of narrative drive and urgency.

Despite this, the novel is still very much worth reading -- for the excellent writing, for the fascinating characters, and for the glimpse of China during the period shortly after Mao's death, when the pro-democracy movement was first making its presence felt. I feel it's a successful book in many ways, even though I hesitate to call it a successful novel.

(tags: a: li yiyun, china, chinese-american)

puritybrown.livejournal.com

42: Sky Burial by Xinran

In two of her other books, Xinran mentions in passing Shu Wen, the elderly woman she ran into who was clearly Chinese in ethnicity but dressed in traditional Tibetan clothing -- a woman who had gone to Tibet in the 1950s to look for her husband, and spent over thirty years there. This is that woman's story, as told to Xinran. And: my God. What a story. I found it deeply, deeply moving, not just the sadness of Shu Wen's situation but the kindness and solidarity she encountered, even as a Chinese woman who had come to Tibet as a soldier during a period when Tibet was being conquered. I'm a sucker for stories about human goodness -- about people helping each other when they have nothing to gain -- and this book is chockfull of it.

I've noticed that one the characteristics of Xinran's writing is that she always strives to see the good in people, to dwell on kindness and compassion, and to ask: how can we care for one another better? In some respects this can be a little frustrating, when it seems she underestimates how hard it can be to get through to the people who cause suffering. In the case of this book in particular, Shu Wen's experience was such as to leave her ignorant of most of what went on in Tibet during her stay there; she didn't learn to speak Tibetan for a long time, and even when she learned the language, she spent most of her time with an isolated nomadic herding family, cut off from events elsewhere in the country. And so Sky Burial does not really address the damage done to Tibet by the Chinese government because Shu Wen didn't know about it; it wasn't relevant to her experience; and so Xinran is able to do what she does best: tell a human story. The politics are sort of there, in the background, out of focus, but this is not the book to read if you want to know about Tibetan history or politics or culture in a broader sense. I came away from it feeling privileged to have read this woman's extraordinary story, but eager to learn more about Tibet from a different (preferably Tibetan) point of view, so as to put Shu Wen's experience into perspective.

43: Reaching for the Stars by Lola Jaye

A short self-help book about achieving goals that seem out of your reach. Jaye is a novelist, apparently quite successful (though I've never read any of her novels), and by her own account her upbringing (though happy) was far from privileged, so her talk of the value of hard work and positive attitudes has a bit more weight than it might do from someone who got more of a head start. Actually, although it's not the best self-help book I've read[1] (it's a bit frothy -- basically an extended pep talk without much in the way of concrete advice), it's rather refreshing in some ways. A couple of times, Jaye mentions that you shouldn't assume that having a criminal record means you're condemned to the scrapheap -- it's not something she dwells on, just a passing aside, but it's the kind of aside I'm not used to seeing in this kind of book. Not enough to recommend it, but worth noting.

[1] Um. I read a slightly embarrassing number of self-help books so I have a pretty good basis for comparison.

(tags: black british, a: jaye lola, a: xinran, china, tibet, self-help)

kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com

Title: How Tia Lola Came to ~~Visit~~ Stay
Author: Julia Alvarez
Number of Pages: 147 pages
My Rating: 3/5

Jacket Summary: When Miguel's Tia Lola comes from the Dominican Republic to Vermont to help out his Mami, Miguel is worried that his unusual aunt will make it even more difficult to make new friends. It's been hard enough moving from New York City and Leaving Papi behind. Sometimes he wishes Tia Lola would go back to the island. But then he wouldn't have the treats she's putting in his lunch box, which he's sure helped him make the baseball team. And she really needs his help to learn English so she doesn't use all the words she knows at once: "One-way -caution-you're-welcome-thanks-for-asking." So Miguel changes his wish to a new one, and he finally even figures out a clever way to make it come true.

Review: This is a kids' book and while it's cute and I liked it well enough, it's not really one of those kids' books that's terribly enjoyable for an adult. At least not to me.

Title: Ties That Bind, Ties That Break
Author: Lensey Namioka
Number of Pages: 154 pages
My Rating: 4/5

Jacket Summary: Third Sister in the Tao family, Ailin has watched her two older sisters having their feet bound. In China in 1911, all girls of good families follow this ancient practice, which is also an extremely painful one. Ailin loves to run away from her governess and play games with her male cousins. Knowing she will never run again once her feet are bound, she refuses to follow this torturous tradition. As a result, the family of her intended husband breaks their marriage agreement. As she enters adolescence, Ailin finds that her family, shamed by her decision, will no longer support her. Chinese society leaves few options for a single woman of good family, but with bold conviction and an indomitable spirit, Ailin is determined to forge her own destiny.

Review: I enjoyed this. It reminded me a lot of many turn-of-the-century girls' stories I read as a kid, like Anne of Green Gables and stuff.

pauraque

This was a book I picked at random off the Asian History shelf at the library, and as soon as I started reading I felt like I had waded in over my head. I had to stop and do some background reading to figure out exactly what the Cultural Revolution *was*. If you don't know, this book won't tell you -- it was written in Chinese for a Chinese audience, and it assumes that you know what the political situation was and who the major government players were. I did not, and I doubt a read-through of a few Wikipedia articles gave me the knowledge that a person should have to fully understand and assess this book.

That said, I read the book anyway. It was a disturbing and puzzling experience on several levels.

( Read more... )

To sum up, I don't think I can really recommend this. It has a few strong points and memorable scenes, and it may read better to someone more familiar with Chinese politics, but by the end I felt the author had painted himself as a cold-hearted bastard who never learns anything from his terrible experiences. I hope that isn't the truth, but it's what I got from his book.

(eta tags: a: ma bo, chinese, china, cultural revolution, memoir)

mizchalmers.livejournal.com

Hi! It's been an unforgivable eleven months since I last posted, so you've probably all forgotten me or had a generational change and transcended to become godlike beings, in which case, good for you! Try to be benevolent. Anyway! I didn't come close to reading 50 books last year or this, but my involvement in this community definitely changed my reading habits for the better, permanently, so, you know, thanks for that.

34. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

In my defense I read this long before I realized there was going to be a film (which I will probably end up seeing anyway, because Keira Knightley's cheekbones, guh.) Strange, haunting setup as what seems to be no more than a slightly weird British boarding school novel turns into something science-fictional and appalling. I think it works brilliantly as a critique of late-capitalist society, in which we are all fungible body parts intentionally distracted by trivialities while being fed into the rotating knives. But then I always say that.

35. Nora K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Finished it. Didn't fly for me, not sure why, since everyone I know and respect adored it. Will try it again.

36. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Pitch-perfect on the revolting excess and absurdity of the Iraq war. An excellent companion piece to Rory Stewart's The Prince of the Marshes.

37. Gene Yang, Prime Baby

Having loved American Born Chinese with a fond love, I picked this up for Kid #1, who is a prime number enthusiast with a baby sibling. The book - which features an older brother figuring out that his baby sibling is an alien through her strategic deployment of primes - was an instant hit with its target demographic, and has since been taken up by Kid #2 in turn.

38. Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows

Contrived Coincidence.

39. Mei Ling Hopgood, Lucky Girl

40. Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood

Nothing galvanizes your curiosity about transracial adoption like your best friend adopting transracially (unless, I guess, it is you that is adopting transracially. But I always get the two of us mixed up.) These two adult adoption memoirs are often recommended as point and counterpoint, which is a little unfair to Hopgood, an adult adoptee who was born in Taiwan. Her Lucky Girl is competent and her story extremely interesting, if sometimes too digressive (I am here for the reunion, I am not very interested in the geography of Taiwan right now) and too reliant on journalistic tricks (please do not telegraph your plot twists in advance, thanks, the management.) Hopgood ends up deciding she was better off adopted, which makes her book the darling of adoptive parents who don't really want to hear the bad news.

Trenka: not so much! Her circumstances are very different, for one thing. For another - and this is what makes the comparison unfair - while Hopgood is a perfectly serviceable reporter, Trenka is an extraordinarily gifted writer, and her story is harrowing on any number of levels. I finished The Language of Blood sitting in my favourite cafe with tears and snot running down my face, and it is still with me. Trenka engaged me far beyond my original need to know about international adoption and its injustices and outcome. I'll read everything she writes.

Bonus round! Whether you consider the following writers white or not probably depends on where you grew up. The Australia in which I grew up was so overwhelmingly white that people of Greek ancestry tended not to identify, or to be identified, as "Anglo." That hair-splitting racial tension is ever-present in The Slap and nowhere in Logicomix, not surprisingly, because the latter book is not Australian! But I couldn't figure out a consistent way to include or exclude these two until I decided to list them both as extras, and so here we are!

Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou, Logicomix

If you love mathematics and history and especially the history of mathematics, call me! Or at least walk over broken glass to get your hands on this beautiful, brilliantly-researched graphic novel, which follows the life of a personal hero of mine, Cambridge mathematician Bertrand Russell.

Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

This book was big news when it was published in Australia last year, and then again in the UK when it was longlisted for the Man Booker. In the English reviews especially there was a lot of handwringing about how awful some of the characters are, especially the deliverer of the eponymous slap. This was very amusing to me, because those characters tended to be note-perfect depictions of the kinds of men I grew up with. Anyway, to conflate the author's opinion with that of a character he is clearly satirizing is to fail lit crit 101. Get on that, London reviewers! More substantial criticisms addressed the sometimes-flabby prose and the invariably-squicky sex scenes. But. But!

Tsiolkas means a lot to me. He has been publishing novels since I was a fresh-out-of-uni candy raver in Sydney. He started in the gay ghetto and this is his first real crossover novel, and I am probably overidentifying more than a little, but I found it quite exhilarating that a writer of more or less my exact generation could take on such an ambitious project and nearly, almost pull it off. It's flawed, sure, but it's picaresque and panopticonic and high realist and it's groping for a Dickensian or Trollopian critique of all of Australian society. I love the book for being at once unapologetically provincial and unashamedly serious. And yet it's also very funny. I'm rambling! But I liked it a lot! Maybe you would too!

sumofparts.livejournal.com

( Cut for length and mild spoilers )

gingicat

I bought this book because I heard Ms. Min speaking about it on NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125682489

This book follows the life of Pearl S. Buck, white author of The Good Earth, through the eyes of a life-long Chinese friend. This friend is fictional, based upon several people in Ms. Buck's life.

The narrator is definitely a self-insert character, but *not* a Mary Sue. She is, first and foremost, the person who believes that Pearl is as Chinese as she herself is.

Ms. Min grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and her deep bitterness at how Mao Tse-Tung and Madame Mao treated Pearl Buck and many other people beloved to the narrator is very evident. Nothing is whitewashed.

One thing I found interesting: unlike the characters in The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan, no-one in this book mentions foot-binding. It is unclear whether this is supposed to be because of the influence of Pearl's Christian missionary background, or whether the author, having no experience with it, simply left it out.

I liked the book. I liked it a lot. The images in it have stayed with me, and will for a long time. Apologies for the disorganized review.

glinda-penguin.livejournal.com

I've been holding off on posting for a while as I had four books by Chinese authors out of the library and I wanted to review them all together. However, Beijing Coma is really interesting but really long so it'll be a while before I finish that and I have other books to write up.

In the Pond - Ha Jin

( Read more... )

Wild Ginger - Anchee Min

( Read more... )

The Garlic Ballads - Mo Yan

( Read more... )

Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salmon Rushdie

( Read more... )

Low Fat Meals in Minutes - Ainsley Harriott

( Read more... )

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

A gorgeously illustrated and lively picture book retelling of the beginning of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. (One version of the latter here: The Monkey and the Monk: An Abridgment of The Journey to the West).

Given that it’s a picture book, it concludes once the companions are all assembled, with a note that the real story has only just begun. But it stands well on its own as a playful adventure with tons of action.

I shamefully confess that I haven’t yet read the original, though I have obtained the version I linked above, so I don’t know how accurate this version is. But it tells a good story and might be an easy introduction to the premise and the main characters.

Illustrated by L. K. Tay-Audouard.

Monkey: The Classic Chinese Adventure Tale

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

This picture book briefly and simply tells the stories behind some Chinese idioms and references, like “Yu Gong Moves the Mountains” and “A Man From Zheng Buys Shoes.” The illustrations, in very different styles as they’re by different artists, are great. My favorites are the elegant and intricate work on “Yu Gong Moves the Mountains” and the bright, playful watercolors of “The Fox Borrows the Tiger’s Power and Prestige.”

The stories are interesting (some were familiar to me and some were not), about a fox who tricks a tiger, an old man who enlists his family to move mountains, two archers who learn lessons in concentration and skill, and a fool story. The language is flat, but maybe that’s the translation.

The stories had endings which felt a bit abrupt to me, as if they needed one or two more sentences. It’s not that they didn’t conclude, but that they ended the instant the story did, without further reflection or any call-back to the idiom itself. Perhaps this is my unfamiliarity with how the stories work in the culture, though, and other readers would feel that we are supposed to draw our own conclusions or would already be intimately familiar with the meaning, and so anything more would be being insultingly spoon-fed. If you get this for a child who isn’t already familiar with the sayings, it might require some explanation and discussion afterward.

Illustrated by He Youzhi, Ding Xiofang, Wang Xiaoming, and Dai Dunbang.

Stories behind Chinese Idioms (II)

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

44. Jeniffer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

A pop non-fiction book covering pretty much every possible topic related to Chinese food in America. There are chapters on the origins of American-Chinese dishes (fortune cookies, chop suey, General Tso's chicken), a history of Chinese immigration to America, the risks taken by deliverymen (including a horrifying story of a deliveryman who got trapped in an elevator for several days, which I took the opportunity to retell when I was briefly stuck in an elevator myself last week, possibly terrifying the people stuck with me), the story of a family who buys a Chinese restaurant, people who have won the lottery using numbers from fortune cookies, and others. I think my favorite chapter was the one where Lee sets out to find the best Chinese restaurant in the world, outside of China itself.

Overall, this is a light, fun read. I have no idea how the book actually originated, but it reads a lot like Lee (who is a journalist) found some vaguely-related articles and reworked them into a book. Which is not necessarily a flaw; it makes for a very breezy book, which is sometimes what I'm in the mood for.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: The Simpsons on TV

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

This illustrated history of Chinese emperors is rather hectic and hard to follow if you’re as ignorant of Chinese history as I am, as it’s a 180 page book which begins with the invention of fire and concludes with the Qing Dynasty. Nevertheless, it’s an entertaining introduction to a vast history.

Rather than attempting a summary, I will simply excerpt some of my favorite bits:

In particular, he [Shennong] is remembered for tasting hundreds of wild herbs in order to find remedies to treat his people’s illnesses. In the process, he suffered from poisoning, even to the extent of being poisoned 70 times on a particular day. Eventually, he tasted a lethal wild herb which tore his intestines apart, and it became known as duanchangcao*

*Herb that tears the intestines apart.

…

It may be said that the Qin Dynasty was destroyed by eunuch intervention.

This two-panel comic sequence should give you an idea of the “1000 years of history in 15 minutes” flavor of the book:

Panel 1: Emperor Gaozong (peeking into temple to meet Wu Zetian): “Dear, come back to the palace with me.”

Panel 2: Wu Zetian (with sheaf of papers): “I’ve drafted the 12 Guiding Principles for administrative, military, economic, social, and cultural affairs.”

Emperor Gaozong (holding hand over eyes): “I’m weak in health and have contracted an eye disease. You may decide any good policies.”

I note that there is a companion book, Infamous Chinese Emperors, which I sadly don’t own.

Compiled and Illustrated by Tian Hengyu. View on Amazon: Great Chinese Emperors - Tales of Wise and Benevolent Rule

mizchalmers.livejournal.com

28. K. Tempest Bradford, Until Forgiveness Comes

"I used to feel sort of bitter about the people who didn't stop to help the injured and, basically, stepped on them to get out. After that ritual I understood. It was hard not to bolt myself."

Disclosure: Tempest and I are co-bloggers at Geek Feminism, but we haven't met (alas! I am condemned to admire from afar.) "Forgiveness" is a ceremony and a wish-fulfillment fantasy and a serious argument about grief and morality. Above all, it is an effort to placate the angry ghosts in the wake of a terror attack, and to help the living and the dead grope their way towards, if not acceptance, peace. It's an admirably efficient and dense piece of world-building that uses the conventional shorthand of science fiction to shattering political effect. It reminds me a little of the good bits of Frank Herbert's Dune, but it's much better than that.

Now I have to go and read everything else of hers, and she, like all my other favourite short-story writers (Ted Chiang, Leonard Richardson, I'm looking at you) needs to go out and write me a space opera :)

29-30. Octavia Butler, Seed to Harvest and Lilith's Brood

Not that I have time in my life for any other space-operas of genius, not with all the Octavia Butler I have yet to read. I am proud to say I have gotten two middle-aged white men addicted to her works. She's now in my all-time top ten.

If "Fledgling" is about venture capital and "Seed to Harvest" about corporate personhood, limited liability, capitalism and the patriarchy, "Lilith's Brood" - also called the Xenogenesis series - is about rape. Butler tackles the matter from every angle: colonialism, slavery, domestic violence, learned helplessness, genetic engineering, resource exploitation and environmental collapse. Her alien invaders see themselves as benevolent; as behaving as compassionately as they can while obeying the dictates of their genetically-programmed manifest destiny. Her human characters see them as monsters, lovers, saviours and worms.

Her tales are told in her trademark cool, clear, judicious sentences. She gives all her characters agency and integrity. Her jeopardy is not contrived or exaggerated for effect. Instead it stems organically from the facts of the situation. It leaves you with a lump in your throat not unlike the one you may feel when contemplating the death of beloved elders, or studying critical history. She is a bleak writer but she never gives into despair, and the effect of her books, at least for me, is anything but dispiriting. Her clarity of vision gives me courage and stiffens my resolve.

31. Guillermo Rosales, The Halfway House

"I taught five peasants how to read," she confesses.

"Oh yeah? Where?"

"In the Sierra Maestra," she says. "In a place called El Roble."

"I was around there," I say. "I was teaching some of the peasants in La Plata. Three mountains from there."

"How long ago was that, my angel?"

I close my eyes.

"Twenty-two... twenty-three years ago," I say.

"Nobody understands that," she says. "I tell my psychiatrist and he just gives me strong Etafron pills. Twenty-three years, my angel?"

She looks at me with tired eyes.

"I think I'm dead inside," she says.

"Me too."

Now this was a devastating book. William Figueras, a thinly-veiled author avatar, stumbles into a filthy and corrupt community care facility in Miami, where he meets Frances. Both have been betrayed by Cuba, and both still yearn for connection and hope. Simply and vividly written, "Halfway House" evokes the streetscape of Miami, the anxiety of poverty and mental illness and the horror of institutional neglect. If you want your day just freakin' well made, know that this brilliant, unforgettable work was not published until after its author killed himself.

32. Chol Hwan Kang, The Aquariums of Pyongyang

North Korea ~~is pretty much the worst place on earth~~'s government is right down there with the worst in the world. It's the last real Stalinist dictatorship. There is no freedom; of assembly, of religion, of the press, nothing. Kang's book is one of only a handful of pieces of survivor testimony out of the massive concentration camp complex. It's an essential read.

Kang's grandparents were economic migrants from South Korea to Japan, where his grandfather became a successful capitalist while his grandmother became more and more involved in supporting the Communist regime in the North. Eventually she persuaded them to move to Pyongyang. Once there, of course, they could not leave, and predictably enough the capitalist grandfather eventually fell out of favour with the regime.

Among the many diabolical aspects of North Korea is its three-generation punishment policy. Because Kang's grandfather went to the camps, his grandmother, father and all his siblings were sentenced as well. His stories of life in the prison camps are all the more excruciating for their juxtaposition with his normal Westernized childhood in Japan and even his former privileged status in Pyongyang; hence the aquariums of the title. Totalitarian North Korea is not an exotic theme park. It is happening to people like you and me, right now. Go ahead and try not to be haunted by this book.

33. Ying Chang Compestine, The Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party

Repression doesn't have to be total to be horrible. This memoir of growing up in Mao's Cultural Revolution is packaged as a young adult read. It's pretty intense, and the thought of giving it to my daughter depresses me, but hey, it's a dark world out there. The writing is simple and lovely and one narrative twist in particular blindsided me like a whiplash.

(I didn't mean to have three fierce anti-communist screeds in one set of reviews, honest! I'm a very progressive European-style democratic socialist (forget the public option, go single-payer, America!) but I am for, you know, freedom and stuff. To be honest I suspect it's easier for writers of colour to get published if they're writing against nominally leftist regimes and can thus be positioned as poster-children for unregulated industrial capitalism. Saint Octavia, of course, transcends categorization of any kind :))

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

34. Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix

A YA fantasy novel set in a world based on Chinese legends and history, the plot concerns Ai Ling's search for her father, teaming up with some people she meets on her travels, and finding out about her special destiny. I really enjoyed the vast, vast number of monsters and other supernatural creatures Ai Ling has encounters with; there was always another legend or story popping up, and that felt very fun to me. I also agree with many other reviewers who have said that all the eating scenes in this book are fantastic, and make you hungry. Totally true! Although it made me realize that most fantasies a) don't show the characters eating very often, and b) when they are, it's usually "stew". Or occasionally "bread and cheese". A little description goes a long way, authors!

On the other hand, I felt like the writing was a little flat, and that really prevented me from getting into the story as much as I might have otherwise. Still, a very fun read overall, and I'm looking forward to more books by the author.

Current Mood: cheerful

sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com

#28 - Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (1999, Rider & Co)
Appointed by Nelson Mandela to be co-Chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in South Africa following the transfer of power from the Nationalist Apartheid Government, Desmond Tutu writes in this book about the history leading to the Commission, the progress of the Commission itself, and his thoughts on forgiveness. Link here.

#29 - illustrated by David Diaz, Smoky Night, words by Eve Bunting (1994, Harcourt Brace)
The illustrations are stunning. The backgrounds are mixed media collage: including shards of glass one the page that mentions "smash and destroy", half-crushed rice cracker snacks on the page about the destruction of Mrs Kim's shop. Link here.

#30 - illustrated by David Diaz, Just One Flick of a Finger, words by Marybeth Lorbiecki (1996, Dial)
A beautiful example of the way picture books are meant to work (no matter what age group they are aimed at) and I credit a lot of that to Diaz' design and layout work in addition to his illustrations. Link here.

#31 - Adeline Yen Mah, China: Land of Emperors and Dragons (2008, Allen & Unwin)
It is a *very* basic introduction to Chinese history; very much an overview. It (allied with some Avatar-related posts I've been reading around LJ, and IBARW stuff) has made me realise how much I don't understand about China, and how I do tend to view the entire Imperial era as some sort of pretty fantasy "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" world. Which is a major failing on my part. Link here.

Tags needed: a: tutu desmond, a: mah adeline yen, i: diaz david, (and if we're still going to do whitefella tags, w-a: lorbiecki marybeth, w-a: bunting eve.