January TIOLI Challenge: Read a book about China or Chinese immigrants

This is an offshoot of the Main January TIOLI topic: http://www.librarything.com/topic/129177

The topic of China is big these days and getting bigger. I plan to read a mixture of fiction and non fiction, even science fiction about China or Chinese immigrants anywhere.

Some books (mostly fiction) about China or Chinese culture I enjoyed and would recommend:

Fiction:
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan - Lisa See - the parts about foot binding and a secret language are fascinating
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie - books are prohibited during the cultural revolution
The Girl who Played Go - Shan Sa
The Bonesetter's Daughter - Amy Tan
The Hundred Secret Senses - Amy Tan

Nonfiction:
The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang - tha Japanese inavde China during WWII
Iron and Silk - Mark Salzman - teaching English in China
Kosher Chinese - Michael Levy - a terrific LT ER book in which an observant young Jewish man is sent to China for his Peace Corps assignment
Daughter of China - Meihong Xu and Larry Engelman - a look back at the cultural revolution

I added Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. It's on loan by a friend. I always like it when a book I've been wanting to read fits a TIOLI challenge!

I've read many of those, Madeline. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is on my best of all times list. The movie was disappointing, but eventually got to the meaning of the book. Kosher Chinese sounds great. Of course, my library system doesn't have it. I may have to break out my holiday gift card from BN and buy it.

Kosher Chinese is so cute. It's about a young Jewish man (the author) who was sent to China for his Peace Corps tour. I didn't even know that the Peace Corps sent volunteers there!

I was very interested in knowing how Levy's Jewish upbringing was going to affect his experience in China. That's why I requested the book from ER in the first place. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed that book. I hope you like it as well.

Man's Fate by Andre Malraux would be a good one for this challenge. Unfortunately, it doesn't really fit into my 2012 reading plan.

I have half a dozen books I've tagged China on my tbr mountain. I'll try to read (at least) two of them. DD is studying in Shanghai so I'll be looking at everyone's suggestions with great interest.

One is another memoir of the Peace Corp in China called River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler.

The second is an old Pearl S. Buck biography of her father entitled Fighting Angel.

I'm planning on reading Red Dust by Ma Tian. It's been on my shelf for a while now.

May I recommend Legends of the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng for a different perspective on China and Chinese culture?

It's fiction, in a way, as it is recounting a lot of folklore that is from different sources and putting it into a single narrative. But because it's folklore, it's also a bit of non-fiction.

If you read my review on the book (the only one :P), I didn't really care for the book for my own purposes, though I did find it interesting, but I think for most people it would be very suitable. Just not if you're looking for the original fragments before they were combined into the one narrative!

I also super super super super super x10000 love House Home Family : Living and being Chinese. It's non-fiction and is actually a textbook, I think? But it's written for someone who wants to learn about Chinese culture from the way their houses are built and arranged, I guess you could say. It begins by teaching the character for "garden" and how it represents some of the basic ideas of "home" and "inside/outside". It also talks about lots of the folkloric carvings and decorations and colors and so on of buildings, and the way homes vary in the north vs the south and about yin/yan and the number 4 and everything like that. And towards the end it looks at modern Chinese building practices and what is changing and what remains the same.

If there is one book that has really shown me traditional Chinese culture, it's House Home Family for encompassing so much.

Old Madam Yin is also very good. It's by Ida Pruitt who grew up in China and lived in Peking before the wars - she was the daughter of missionaries. So this book is a biography/memoir that Pruitt wrote about her life in the city at the time, mostly revolving around the older matriarch.

Heart of Lies takes place primarily in Shanghai in the 1930s, if you want a mystery/romance novel. I didn't care for it much, but I expected something different from the ER description, so that soured me on it a bit.

Rock Paper Tiger is a contemporary thriller about a former US soldier who had served time in Iraq but has gone to China to escape her life (she's struggling with PTSD). There's a lot about the underground art scene and the Chinese side of the Internet, and it's gritty, I guess you might say. I'm not a fan of thrillers and didn't realize it was one when I picked it up.

7: I was so taken by an article by Peter Hessler in the New Yorker (not about China), that when I saw he'd written a book about his experience in China, I bypassed the wishlist and immediately plopped it into the cart.

Another book that I have on hand is On Gold Mountain by Lisa See, which I'm likely to read first because the plan is to focus on US history in 2012.

On Gold Mountain is on my TBR pile as is The Chinese in America by Iris Chang. I'll probably get to only one of them, let's see which one.
Great suggestions, Keristars. I'll bet many of us have books about China or China immigrants on our TBR piles.

11> And I'm definitely adding more to my TBR from other mentions in this thread! (Even though there's no way I'll get to them this month... maybe. I might try to wedge Lucky Girl in - I read the first chapter a few months ago but got distracted and never finished. It's about an American woman who was adopted from China as an infant and how she meets her birth family and learns about them, from what I understand.)

I hope to read a book I've been given for Christmas for this challenge: Shark's fin and Sichuan pepper, which looks like a fascinating book not just about food but cultural history and travel experiences in China.

Keri, I see that Mei-Ling Hopgood's new book is HOW ESKIMOS KEEP THEIR BABIES WARM : and other adventures in parenting around the world. My library has both of hers, I believe I'll have to check her out.

I was thinking I didn't have anything on the TBR that fit this, and then realized I have The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston which seems like a good fit to me. Yay!

I might try and read Hand-grenade Practice in Peking by Frances Wood which I bought recently, mainly because of the title...

Once again I'm presented with so many reads on a topic there's no way I can do them all. I have long wanted to read The Woman Warrior and don't know why I never have. Let us know, Laura, how it is. I agree, Hand-grenade Practice in Peking is a nearly irristable title.

I have so many books on this topic. My mum is a sinologist (an academic whose field of work is China) - as is my dad, but my mum's influence here is much more significant as that's where I grew up and refused to take an interest until I was 18 or 19. I may read Dreams of Joy just because it's a library book so I should probably read it before I have to give it back, but there are lots of books I'd like to read more (including various Lisa See books.

I read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress a few weeks ago. I now have Amy Tan's Rules for Virgins ready to read.

I picked up 54 by Wu Ming a while back but I'm not sure I'll get to it in January. ETA: This is a Chinese author, but not about Chinese people. I should have read more carefully. :)

Well, UnrulySun, I said I'd never get through everthing, but I think I can fit in a short story, so I'll join you in Rules for Virgins. I haven't read anything by Amy Tan for some time, in fact not since Saving Fish From Drowning, which seems more relevant daily.

#19 - actually 'Wu Ming' is not a Chinese person at all but a collective of Italians.... they picked the name because it means 'nameless' in Chinese, although I don't know why they wanted to call themselves 'nameless' in Chinese... perhaps reading the book will illuminate?

Ah! So it doesn't fit at all then, lol!

I went to Barnes an Noble today to get my non reading grandson a copy of Hunger Games. It seems a friend of his read the whole series, and since there's a movie coming out, he thinks he'll like it. Hm, we'll see. Anyway, while I was there I saw a copy of Kosher Chinese on sale and couldn't resist. Guess I'll have to add it to the growing list. Also, for some reason my library is spotlighting books about China and Chinese culture, so I picked up a copy of Zheng He which is big and beautiful. I remember reading in one of Jared Diamond's books about how the Chinese had been such great explorers but pulled back from the world leaving their country backward for centuries. This must have been one of the explorers he was talking about. Evidently those in the Ming dynasty destroyed as many of the records of his voyages as they could find but 2 records written by his Muslim ship mates remain.

I really enjoyed Kosher Chinese which was a book that I won from LT ER. I hope you and Patrick enjoy it as much as I did. I can't answer your questions about the Chinese customs, but if I can be of any assistance about the Jewish customs, let me know. :)

I am planning on reading a non-fiction book called Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah. This sounds very like the book that Joyce has listed as "Fallen Leaves" by the same author. Does anyone know if they are the same book?

Chinese Cinderella is the YA edition of Falling Leaves. I read it a few years ago and thought it was excellent. I think it has a slightly lower page count.

I'd love to participate in this challenge, as I have at least two dozen unread books on my shelves that would fit. However, I'm already solidly committed for the month. If I'm able to finish those books I'll join you, and I'd probably read A Free Life by Ha Jin.

My first book of the year will fit this challenge: Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu. I have already read the first few pages and am enjoying it - it starts with a shipboard romance between two Chinese returning from studying abroad, in the 1930s.

25> Yeah, Chinese Cinderella leaves out some of the details of Falling Leaves and changes some of the emphasis slightly, particularly what happened after Mah became an adult, iirc. If you've read the adult version, the YA one won't have anything new, but if you read the YA one, the adult one will have some additional insights.

I rather liked the paired read of Chinese Cinderella and My Name is Number 4 for two similar but different perspectives of the same story (more or less).

#26 & 29 - Thanks for the information. I've checked my library and they don't have Falling Leaves but I will start with the YA one, and perhaps will be able to locate the other at some point.

Well, after talking about books about China, I've gone and reawakened my MUST LEARN MORE NOW brain lobe and have requested Daughter of China: A true story of love and betrayal from my local library. I've a strong interest in learning more about every day life during the Cultural Revolution - not necessarily the political changes that seem to be the basis of most nonfiction books. (S'why I liked the books I referenced in #29 as much as I did.) (Also why I liked Nothing to Envy about North Korea.)

I'm going to see if I can't finish Lucky Girl before the library calls to tell me the book's ready, if anyone would like to arrange a shared read this month.

I see Lucky Girl has arrived at the library for me, so I'll join you, Keri.
I finished my first book of the new year, World and Town about a woman (age 67, how unusual is that for a main character?) who was born in China of a Chinese father and an American mother who was the daughter of missionaries but went native. When the cultural revolution threatened they managed to sneak her to America where eventually she becomes a neurobiologist and teacher with a large number of people who depend on her and love her but she continues to feel like an outsider. The book is about principles of all types: scientific, economic, academic, religious- Confucian, christian, fundamentalist christian - and what to do when they conflict with personal relationships. A major portion of the book revolves around the attempt of the main character, Hattie, to help some Cambodian immigrants who have moved in next door. Everything is very complicated and Hattie ends up being far more forgiving than I could ever imagine myself being. I don't know if that's because of her age and sense of mortality or the fact that she lives in a small town where one is forced to get along with one's neighbors out of necessity, or because of her Chinese - Confucian background. However she manages it, Hattie is fascinating character.

Ooh, I've been planning on reading On Gold Mountain this year, too, so I will join this challenge and try to get to it in January!

Ah, good. Some shared reads.

Finished The Woman Warrior tonight. Interesting construction and fascinating subject matter. The book is really 5 sections, not even really short stories. Some are told in first person, at least one is completely third person as she personally plays a small role so she just left herself out.

She touches on so many subjects. She talks about being female in a culture that values men. She covers the struggles during the time her father was in the US for 15 years while her mother was still in China. She does a great job of showing how life in the US was so different from the life her mother had built for herself in China while waiting.

I really thought the way she told each story was an integral part of the story she was telling. I recommend it. And I'm glad I read it.

In addition to the many wonderful books listed already and based on some of those recommendations, I suggest the following:

China and Immigration:

A Free Life Ha Jin
Jews of Shanghai:
Ten Green Bottles: The True Story of One Family’s Journey from War-Torn Austria to the Ghettos of Shanghai Vivian Jeanette Kaplan

Shanghai Diary: A Young Girl’s Journey from Hitler’s Hate to War-Torn China Ursula Bacon

(There have been many books -- mainly memoirs-- based on the experience of European Jews in Shanghai during WWII. These are 2 I've read. They're interesting, but there may be better-written books out there).

China – Fiction:

Anything by Ha Jin - He is an absolutely amazing (and heartbreaking) author. His book Waiting is one of the best I've ever read.

4 "classic" Chinese books:

Diary of a Madman and other stories Lu Xun

Travels of Lao Can Liu E

Teahouse Lao She

Monkey: A Journey to the West

China – Non-Fiction:

China in Ten Words Yu Hua - the book I am currently finishing. Really well-written.

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China Jung Chang - An amazing book. Really well written and very moving. Jung recounts her story, her mother's story and her grandmother's story against the backdrop of 20th century China.

Mao: the Unknown Story Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Stillwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945 Barbara Tuchman

I just realized that I am currently reading a collection of short stories set in China Gold Boy, Emerald Girl - so I guess I have joined in my first TIOLI without planning too!

And I agree with plt - Ha Jin is amazing.

I am going to read Kosher Chinese for this challenge. Madeline was nice enough to send it to me last year.

ETA: I was incorrect in identifying who sent me the book - it was Gail, not Madeline. Sorry, Gail!

Thanks for some interesting suggestions, plt. Jews in China, not something we usually think about.
Laura, Woman Warriors sounds very good. I think I have a copy somewhere around here. I should look for it. The idea of a wife waiting in China for 15 years is almost too much to contemplate. I know it happens all over the world, but it's an idea full of unbearable yearning, or so it seems to me.

> 38

I think you'll really like it, Stasia. I found it a fun read.

I have Wild Swans on hold from the library and it is on my list of planned reads for the year, so if I get it in time I will read that.

Last year I read A Good Fall--a short story collection by Ha Jin. All of the stories were about the Chinese immigrant experience, and I would recommend it.

When I told someone I don't like Wild Swans and why a few years ago, he recommended Red China Blues by Jan Wong. She's a Chinese Canadian and left her puzzled Canadian family to study in China as an ardent young Maoist in the 1970s, she gradually rethought things but she's very funny and self deprecating, unlike Jung Chang who I just found really whingy and self-pitying.

#40: I remember that you liked it a lot, Madeline. I hope I enjoy it as much as you did.

Woman Warrior sounds really interesting. It's one of those books I've always heard of but never gotten around to checking out for myself.

One of my favorite books (due for a reread this year maybe) A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo, which is about a young Chinese woman who comes to London to study English.

I just read an oral-tradition story of one of China's minorities, Ashma.
Review: http://moonplanet.dreamwidth.org/60370.html (but also in my thread :) )

I managed to pick up Falling Leaves today and will try to fit it in this month. I've also got Wild Swans on my TBR but it is a bit of a chunkster so I'm not sure if I'll read it this month. I've also got Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian on my TBR shelves. So there is a bit of choice there so I'll see which one or more I feel like reading:)

I finished Lucky Girl: a memoir last night. I actually found it a little harder to identify with Mei-Ling's American family than her Chinese birth family, because while I expected to have very little in common with the Wangs, whereas the Hopgoods were advertised as All-American, and how could I not be familiar with that, due to television and books and so on? But I found that with the family drama and large number of siblings, the Wang family felt more real to me - even if life in rural Taiwan is very, very different to my life in Florida. But the Hopgood family were depicted through rose-colored nostalgia and was a little too All-American and a little too good to be true, though I understand that this is partly due to the way Mei-Ling was trying to underscore the differences in her two families, partly due to grief for her recently deceased father, and partly because (as she tells us in the book) she spent most of her life rejecting her birth heritage and trying to be as All-American as she could be.

It was an interesting read, which I finished in 2 days - much more quickly than some others I've been pushing myself to finish recently, so I can't say that I didn't enjoy reading it. I do think that it was a bit uneven, though, when it came to some of the family-history revelations. Sometimes, it seemed like Mei-Ling wanted to add drama to the narrative with the revelations, the same way she learned of them, but then she undercuts it by having revealed the details earlier in the book.

Still, it's a memoir about what it's like to have been adopted and to be able to go back and attempt to rejoin one's birth family, and especially what it's like to have two families from such different cultures and classes. The story isn't so much about China or America specifically, but about family.

(Note: there are references to infanticide and child neglect, due to the Confucian society, which also means plenty of misogyny. I feel that it's big enough that it warrants a trigger warning.)

Also, I just picked up Daughter of China: a true story of love and betrayal a few minutes ago and will be starting it tonight.

42 - I second the recommendation of Red China Blues, I really enjoyed it as well.

I did read through Rules for Virgins today. It's very short, but intriguing. There's not plot, no real characters, no story, but it manages to set the scene quite well for the longer work Amy Tan has in store for us.

I'm about 1/2 way through the audiobook of Factory Girls set mostly in the Guangdong province of China in which both 1/3 of the world's shoes and 1/3 of the word's computer disc drivers are made. The girls who go out from their rural farms to try to earn money and find an exciting life working in factories are the epitome of Norman Rockwell American cliched individualism. In fact cliche seem to be the basis for much of their planning. They are taken advantage of at every turn, cheated, mistreated, overlooked and overused and keep on striving for a better life. The book is fascinating on both a political and personal level.
Next up is a re read of Shanghai Girls for my RL book club. I read the book in 2010, but I want to do a quick reread so that I can better enjoy the sequel Dreams of Joy. I remember when I read Shanghai Girls I was so caught up in the story at the end that I couldn't believe she would leave us hanging at such a critical point of action. Now finally I'll get to know what happened.

I just remembered something I heard yesterday on Factory Girls. The author Leslie Chang attends a class on etiquette with some of the factory girls. The teacher says three notable people are Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek, and Hitler because of their ability to talk and influence people. Ethics were in no way involved in some of the more outstanding self improvement courses Chang attended. The main thing was to present oneself well, even if falsely, because appearances were everything.

You know, I feel like I heard about Factory Girls around the time of the Sichuan Earthquake and Beijing Olympics, and how what Chang was writing about tied into what people were seeing in the cities. This was NPR when the hosts of All Things Considered were in China for reporting. But the work page says the book was published in 2009, and that's about a year after the reports I was hearing (and the person doing interviews and research was, iirc, male, but I could just be running it all together in my memory).

That said, if you're interested, you might want to look into the NPR/All Things Considered archives from around that time to get more perspectives.

Here's Leslie T. Chang in a talk for Google Books in 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhcqoxNhrSY
Maybe it was the paperback that came out in 2009.
Her husband's book River Town was mentioned in the talk. Not only did I not know her husband was an author (Peter Hessler), I didn't realize I had read his book several years ago for my RL book club. It's also very good and covers, in other things, the impact of building The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Here's his google talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGRxHQRK8xo

I also read that they have twin daughters and now live in Cairo. Can you imagine living in Cairo with daughters? Lorda'mercy.

I just finished Daughter of China. I found it to be an engrossing read and also informative.

Now to decide what to read next - I'm not sure if I want another book about China or something different.

I do want to find the title of the movie we watched in my Chinese Folklore & Mythology class in 2007, so I can see it again. Reading about Xu Meihong made me remember that I missed parts of the film when I was sick, but what I did see was good. I couldn't remember anything about it except that it's a generational story that involves shadow puppets, but Wikipedia tells me it's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Live based on To Live by Yu Hua. Perhaps that's the answer to which book I should read! ;)

I'm 2/3 of the way through my re-read of Shanghai Girls and am finding it very informative of the plight of women during the 1937 Japanese invasion of China and of what they had to face when they emigrated to the US and during their time in the Chinatowns of California. I gave the book only 3 1/2 stars the first time around, I wonder if it was because of the last 1/3 of the book. Guess I'll find out tomorrow. So far it's very interesting.

> 54

Keri, I read Daughter of China back in 2000 and posted a review of the book on Amazon. At that time, the author, Larry Engelmann, emailed me to thank me for my review! I was tickled. Yes, I was using dial-up internet access then with a company called CapAccess. I guess no one here has ever hear of that company. That was a while ago. :)

> 55

I just started reading Shanghai Girls, but it will take me lots of time as I'm only listening to it when I ride in my car on the weekends. I doubt if I'll finish it this month. My husband read it, though, and said it was good. It seems to be starting off well...

I started Red Dust, and it's interesting so far. The author, Ma Tian, is (was?) an artist/dissident in China. The book is his memoir, and it starts in the early 1980s.

I just finished Shanghai Girls and liked it much better than the first time around. I gave it 4.5 stars this time and only 3.5 last time, I think because I was so upset by the action of the characters. It's a good view of family life among the Chinese in both China of the 1930's and America through the 1960's with a view of the invasion of the Japanese, the interrogation of Chinese immigrants at Angel Island, life in California Chinatowns, the Chinese in American motion pictures and the shameful harassment by anticommunist zealots of Chinese who had been in American for decades. Lisa See does great historical fiction. So now I'm on to the follow up book, Dreams of Joy.

Madeline, I thought you couldn't listen to audiobooks, que pasa?

I can listen to and understand a few of them. It's just that I can't understand so many narrators. I usually take about ten CDs out of the library and keep one or two of those which I can I can understand the best.

I'm glad this is one of the ones you can understand. It's well worth the listen.

I also have the book! :)

I just finished Red Dust: A Path Through China by Ma Jian. Jian's memoir begins in 1983, when he is living in Beijing. He works as a propaganda journalist but is a dissident poet, and as he is about to be arrested by the Public Security Bureau, he takes off on a journey through China. He leaves not only to avoid arrest but also because he feels he is looking for something. A blurb on the back cover of my edition refers to him as part of "China's Beat Generation," and this really is a lot like On the Road, with a longer and more dangerous journey. Jian travels by train, hitchhiking, bus, whatever, but in many cases walks for days at a time as he criss-crosses huge chunks of China. He meets all sorts of people along the way--other poets and artists but also many of the native peoples of China. He nearly dies at least three times.

His travel adventures are a sufficient story, but added on to that is a story of what it was like to live in China in the 1980s. I have only read a couple of books about China, but in every one, I have been struck by how incredibly dirty it seems. Jian talks about terrible pollution--not as a tree-hugger, but as someone who has to wear a face mask at times to be able to keep walking. Jian, as a dissident, also experiences the illogical but terrifically harsh wrath of the Communist Party. One of the reasons he comes under suspicion in Beijing is that he used too much yellow in designing a newspaper piece, which his boss says makes them look like a "pornographic trade union," because he thinks yellow equates with pornography. I have read a fair amount about communist rule in Eastern Europe, but the extent to which the Chinese government interfered in people's personal lives--things like whether they went dancing and how long their hair was--surprised me. In addition to all this, most everyone Jian encounters seems to live in terrible poverty. Even city dwellers with what appear to be respectable jobs live (in the 1980s!) in tiny apartments or houses that lack indoor plumbing.

What I cannot understand is how the Chinese government managed to keep the millions and millions of people living in these conditions under control for so long. Why didn't the Chinese rise up against the terrible poverty, pollution, and totalitarianism? Having just read Prelude to Independence, in which the author describes how American journalists kept colonial sentiment against the British stirred up because of things like a tax on documents, it is difficult to understand why a group of people would submit to such awful conditions.

>>A few coments on your post 62 re conditions in China. DD is a Chinese major studying at a language university in a major city. These are some of her impressions.

Air pollution is a problem in the city she is in. She wears a mask on the worst days. She says that even though the campus has open areas, seeing a bird is a rare event. The streets are dirty enough that she doesn't wear her 'outside' shoes into her dorm room. She would prefer leaving them outside her door, but anything left in the hallway is considered 'up for grabs' so she bags them before bringing them in her room.

Her private dorm room is in a building for International students and is lovely. It has a private bath, flat screen TV and maid service once a week. (How many US dorm rooms can boast all that!)

However the Chinese dorms have 3 people per room and NO HEAT (belief is that three bodies in a small room can cuddle up and stay warm). There is no heat in the Chinese classrooms, although the buildings for International students' classes have central heat. There is also no hot water in the Chinese dorm. The toilet facility in the Chinese dorm is a shared trough with running water. Her Chinese friends report the conditions are much better than the conditions in the villages and not too much different than conditions in city homes.

What I cannot understand is how the Chinese government managed to keep the millions and millions of people living in these conditions under control for so long. Why didn't the Chinese rise up against the terrible poverty, pollution, and totalitarianism?

It's really difficult to understand, isn't it? Unless you've experienced it yourself. It seems to me to be partly fear of retaliation, fear of being shunned (we are social creatures, after all), lack of knowledge that the "outside world" can be any different/better (or knowledge that it's even possible to escape), and constant propaganda. Plus, perhaps, hope that this is better than the way it was before.

From everything I've read, it seems that conditions in China were pretty crummy in the '40s and '50s - the Japanese occupation was pretty horrid besides - and so Mao Zedong was able to get a lot of support by promising a better life. Of course, with a huge wealth gap, the massive lower classes would dream of better days and support him. Not everyone did, maybe not even a majority, but those who were vocal in dissent were killed or as-good-as-killed, so who would speak up if they thought they could just wait it out or work for change from the shadows? Eventually, things did change, but not necessarily for the better... and it's still pretty bad.

There's also the cultural aspect and the way conformity and the family/village are prized over individuality. You don't win an award for your own good, but to bring pride and status to your family. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down" (and if it sticks out too far, or won't be hammered down, it is removed altogether).

One of the common ideas in a lot of memoirs I've read is that the Chinese people weren't just sheep, like an outsider might suspect, blindly following along and believing everything. They just don't speak their opinions or protest, because there's a greater fear in what would happen if they do. I mean, during Mao's rule, the PLA would go out and do public executions for no reason than to reach a quota, to terrify the populace into obedience.

I'm greatly simplifying matters, of course, and may not really understand it all as well as I could (of course not - I'm a white girl from Florida!), but this is what I've pieced together from everything. I think Nothing to Envy is also pretty good for the insight into why people don't rise up.

#63: Very interesting!

#64: I definitely agree that revolution is harder to talk about than do! I certainly didn't mean to be judgmental about the Chinese people for not rebelling--it's their choice whether to take the risk, and not a situation I would want to be in. I agree that part of the issue is a cultural emphasis on community rather than individuality. In Jian's book the same idea that you describe about the people not being sheep definitely comes across. Most of the people he stays with are other dissidents/artists/poets/etc., and they are trying to express themselves but also avoid persecution.

Part of what I wonder about is how the army and party leaders have stayed in line, even with the slightly better life those roles provided. Like the executions you mention, they were required to do horrible things, and to their own people. We wonder how ordinary Germans participated in or turned a blind eye to the Holocaust, but this in a way is something similar but for a much longer time period and without even the "excuse" of racism. Anyway, the book gave me a lot to think about.

65> Oh, no, I didn't think you were judgmental at all! I was being very sincere in "it's difficult to understand unless you've experienced it yourself". I feel like it's finally not completely foreign to me, like I've learned enough to have some insight, which is why I tried to share that :)

I think I'll add the Jian book to my TBR, though who knows when I'll get to it. It sounds very interesting, and a pov I've not seen yet.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie - Chairman Mao sent thousands of youth into mountain villages from the city to be "re-educated" during the Chinese revolution. This is the story of the son of a doctor and the son of a dentist who were sent to a village. On the mountain, they encountered another young man undergoing re-education who had a suitcase full of contraband books, including Balzac. After reading the book, they shared the story with the daughter of a tailor who was a seamstress. It's an eye-opening look at some of what took place during the Chinese revolution. There is more to the plot, involving the stories of villages, residents of the mountain, family members, etc., but I don't want to give away the rest of the story. In the end, I liked the story, but I didn't love it. It does, however, make those of us who live in non-communist-regime countries grateful that we did not have to undergo a similar experience. 3 stars.

I really was not aware of this "re-education" process until I read the book. I "googled it" a few minutes ago and discovered that even in recent times young people are being sentenced to re-education. SAD!

I've started Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. I'm about 100 pages in and liking it a lot more than Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah. Glad I didn't let that put me off reading another Chinese book this month.

I finished 2 books about China in the past 2 days. First of all Dreams of Joy was a gentle introduction to the history of China during Mao's Great Leap Forward. I say gentle even though there is a harsh description of a communal "struggle" against a villager and forced foot unbinding and very detailed descriptions of the lengths to which people will go when a village is starving. I have The Rape of Nanking on my tbr pile, and after the above gentle descriptions, I just don't think I'll be able to take Chang's harsher ones of Japanese atrocities. One of my favorite parts of Dreams of Joy was the discussion of the various ways village women at the time (1950's) managed their menstrual flow. In the particular village described they made cloth bags and stuffed them with sand then lodged them in their underpants. Other places they put dirt, soft flowers or dried grass in the bags. One woman said that when she was a girl her mother gave her 10 leaves from a special tree that grew by the river. The leaves were to last her her whole life. They were reused each month without being washed in between. One woman who had been a valued 3rd wife of a landowner said they had used the ashes left from burning incense to the ancestors. You would think these women would have welcomed a mikvah at the end of their periods. With all that dirt and ashes they must have felt pretty grimy.

I also finished the 5 star rated Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang. Chang who was born in America but whose ancestry is in China lived in China for 10 years and interviewed the young women who worked at factories making everything from shoes to paint to little parts that are part of other parts. (for Jon Stewart's take on Chinese factories, check this: http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2012/01/17/jon-stewart-weighs-chinese-suicides-... ) These women live lives that would be unacceptable in most of the workers in the developed countries of the world. They sign on to a job without being permitted to see the inside of the factory. They work a minimum of 8 to 12 or 13 hours a day with Sundays and maybe 1/2 day Saturday off (if business is slow) starting at the equivalent of $50 a month. They send money home, but after a while they find they like spending some of that money on themselves. They buy shoes and clothes and vitamins and make up. They buy cell phones which become their life lines. They pay for English lessons. They jump from factory to factory and in the mean time they escape from the communal patriarchal control of their rural farms and make their own decisions. They become as individualistic as the famed cowboys of the American West, in fact their lives are typified by Amway like pyramid schemes and Norman Rockwell cliches. They don't care about politics at all, their only concern is how to make a few more hundred yuan a month. Why don't they revolt - why don't many poor conservatives sign on to the goals of OWS? They think if they work hard enough and make the right decisions one day they'll be rich. And for the most part, they don't go back home. This is a fascinating book.

A little video about the anticipated baby boom in China's year of the dragon.
http://news.yahoo.com/video/whoknew-19124225/baby-boom-for-year-of-the-dragon-27...
I failed to mention how much Lisa See relied on Chinese horoscope signs to shorthand her characters: Dragon, Sheep, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit and Dog. This is part of the reason you can't say either Dreams of Joy or Shanghai Girls was great literature. The characters were simplified to emphasize the history.

The next read for me, rather the continuing read is Zheng He and my next audiobook is Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China by Philip P. Pan.

I finished Zheng He which is a beautiful National Geographic book by Michael Yamashita that has a history of the 15th Century Chinese admiral (and eunuch) who sailed and traded in goods 7 times from China in gigantic wooden junks with a crew composed of 27,000 sailors, doctors, farmers, pharmacologists. He went all the way to Vietnam, Korea, Saudi Arabia, India and the eastern coast of Africa and died returning on his 7th voyage. After this voyage the new emperor decreed that ships could no longer be made from wood (his predecessor had planted the trees specifically for his flotilla), dry docked the boats and pulled the people back inside the Great Wall, not to re emerge for hundreds of years. Yamashita has dozens of beautiful photographs of the places visited by Zheng He with a description of the early migration of Chinese to these far flung lands and the influences shared among them. He even brought a giraffe back from Africa to present to his emperor, Zhu Di and is honored as a god of prosperity, Sam Po Kung, in Southeast Asia. Next up is The Chinese in America: A Narrative History by Iris Chang.

> 70

I'm now reading Shanghai Girls . Although I'm reading to see what happens to the "beautiful girls", sisters who come to America after the Japanese invade China, this story so far feels very contrived. I find it hard to believe the part about (SPOILER ALERT!)...May having a baby and leading others to believe it was Pearl who was pregnant and had the baby. I'm only about 1/3 of the way through this book, but it's not as interesting as Snow Flower and the Secret Fan which I thought was fascinating...especially the parts about footbinding!

The characters were simplified to emphasize the history.

I agree that the characters suffer, and not only by the background history and the Chinese horoscope, but also by the predominance of Chinese customs which are explained every bit of the way. These are interesting to read and understand, but they do interefere with the flow of the story. To me, anyway.

I'd previously read the following books. Here are some of my thoughts about them.

1. The Rape of Nanking - I found this horrifying but educational. I had never before learned about the devastation in China during WWII. I was always taught about WWII from the standpoint of Jewish history - meaning the Holocaust which originated in Germany and mainly targeted Jews. - Recommended.

2. Daughter of China - I was surprised to learn after reading this book that it was really written by the husband rather than the wife. I learned this in an email exchange with the co-author, Larry Englemann. :) - Recommended

3. Falling Leaves - I did not like this book very much at all. It seemed as if it were written by the author as a "poor me" litany of diatribes against the step-mother and as a vendetta against her family members (with the exception of her kindly Aunt Baba). - Not recommended

4. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - This was a short and sweet novel about "re-education" during Mao's regime. I loved its message about the importance of literature and freedom of choice when it comes to reading. - Recommended

Madeline - I wish you had said that about Falling Leaves before I read it:)

I think that book earned the *honour* of the lowest star rating I have given to a book I actually finished.

> 73

Madeline - I wish you had said that about Falling Leaves before I read it

Haha! I'm always hesitant to give a totally negative review of a book that others might like (unless it's an Early Reviewer). I have seen where others have liked this book a lot*...although I can't figure out why.

That book was singularly the one I disliked most in reading about Chinese culture. The actual book I owned ended up under a trash can. No kidding!

*Sixty-seven people here on LT gave that book a five-star rating!!

ETA: I just went back and added my review (written in 1999) of this book to LT. :) I gave it 1/2 star higher rating than you did. :)

I know - that's part of the reason I was willing to read it and I'm pleased to say that I didn't pay for it as I picked it up as part of a buy one get one free at my local recycling shop. I'm not sure if I want to inflict it on some unsuspecting reader by returning it though:)

ETA - I gave it a star as I finished it and another half for some of the history:)

I just wild released it as part of Bookcrossing. I think the guy who found it probably appreciated it more than I did! :)

Hmm, I don't recall how strongly I liked "Fallen Leaves", but I did find it interesting. I read it in my adolescence, and it was one of the first books I read about Shanghai at the time (actually, I'd read the YA book first). I didn't find it to be an overwhelming litany about the family, but since others do think that, I wonder if I wasn't in the "right" age/mood for it. Rather how like a lot of people loved the YA novel "Revolution" but I absolutely loathed it for the horrible whining and "hipster"ness of the narrator. I wasn't the right reader because dealing with my own depression meant that I couldn't really handle a narrator whose depression sounded fake and "trendy" to me. But I can identify with someone who has a litany of complaints about her awful mother, I guess?

At any rate, I've never had any desire to reread the book. I don't think I've tossed it, but I don't actually know where it is.

I might have to drop Shanghai Girls from my WTR list, though, from Madeline's comments. It sounds like the very same things that would annoy me.

> 77

I might have to drop Shanghai Girls from my WTR list, though, from Madeline's comments. It sounds like the very same things that would annoy me.

My husband liked Shanghai Girls, so you never know. I don't dislike this book. I just find it to be slower than my usual reading. It's not a book that I'll quit because I dislike it. It's nice. It's just not overwhelmingly so.

I really didn't like Falling Leaves either, and for very much the same reasons as Madeline. I also didn't like Wild Swans much, for similar reasons.

I feel that I learned a great deal of Chinese and Chinese American history from Shanghai Girls and Dreams of Joy. For instance, there was quite a bit about The Chinese in American motion pictures. I remember loving Charlie Chan movies when I was young, but I'd never heard of Anna May Wong. Because of Shanghai Girls I got a little picture book that is a biography of Anna May Wong, who was the most famous Chinese actress of her day. She assumed, after becoming a star in Europe with the movie Piccadilly that she would get the part of O-lan in the movie of The Good Earth. The part of Wang Lung, however, was played by Paul Muni in "yellowface", and quoting the book: In the script, O-lan had to kiss her husband. Because of the movie studio rule against interracial kissing, only a white actress could be cast as his wife. German born actress Luise Rainer won the role. Can you imagine! Fortunately my local library has both Piccadilly and Anna May Wong's last film Portrait in Black, so I'm planning a bit of a Chinese film marathon this weekend.

I've started Iris Chang's The Chinese in America and just from the introduction I think it's going to be every bit as good as I was hoping. Here's a quote: The great irony of the Chinese American experience has been that success can be as dangerous as failure: whenever the ethnic Chinese visibly excelled - whether as menial laborers, scholars, or businessmen - efforts arose simultaneously to depict their contributions not as a boon to white America but as a threat.

Citizenjoyce, both Zheng He and Factory Girls sound interesting--definitely very different perspectives on China.

It appears China goes through periods of progress followed by long periods of regression and suppression followed by periods of progress. May you live in exciting times seems to be the touchstone.

I'm learning some surprising thing in The Chinese in America. First of all, I'd heard there was another way to get to the west from the eastern US, but I didn't really understand what it would be. There were two versions undertaken because overland journey across North America was so dangerous. People could go by ship all the way around South America then back up the other side to California. Or they could go by ship part of the way down eastern South America, then go overland there which apparently was safer than overland in North America, then continue by ship up the western coast of South and Central America.
A second tidbit that amazed me - during the gold rush California was populated mostly by men, manly men who didn't do laundry; so they would send their laundry to Hong Kong. The round trip would take four months and was expensive, $12 for 12 shirts, but was cheaper than shipping their clothes back east to be washed. After a while folk in Hawaii got in on the deal and would wash 12 shirts for $8. Finally it occurred to the Chinese, who were just as manly but evidently more generously possessed of the entrepreneurial spirit, that they could do the laundry themselves for $5 for 12 shirts. A new American tradition was begun.

From Out of Mao's Shadow I'm learning some of the depth of the ignorance of the general Chinese population of the devastation caused by Mao's regime. In Factory Girls I read that there's a very large Chinese history museum that has absolutely no mention of Mao. In the present book I read that people know there was a famine around the time of the Great Leap Forward, but the government line, believed by most, is that it was due to 3 years of bad weather. People also have no idea of the extent of the famine, thinking a few thousand people may have died rather than the 18 to 40 million who actually perished. In The Chinese in America Iris Chang talks about China having the oldest bureaucracy in the world. When a centralized government has control millions of people, time and again it has been shown that a stupid decision made at the top can result in catastrophic consequences for far flung masses. Philip P. Pan recounts the story of Lin Zhao a loyal and active communist party member who was eventually executed by the party for her criticisms of it in the 1960s. One of the men interviewed said that Lin Zhao didn't mention acutely intense observations, what she said was just common sense, but the government out of control couldn't allow people to think rationally.

> 84

Fascinating information, Joyce!

Factoring in the cost of my new Whirlpool washer and dryer, sending laundry to Hong Kong may not be such a bad idea after all! ;)

Madeline, sending your laundry out sounds wonderful in so many ways.
Reading farther in The Chinese in America I find that early easterners who wanted to get to the west by sea took a ship not all the way around the tip of South America, they went through the Strait of Magellan. Also, for the overland part of the journey they went across Central America rather than South America, then took ship going north. That makes much more sense.
And the tid bits I found out today: After the civil war when the southerners had lost their slaves and wanted someone to come in and scare the former slaves into working for them they contracted to have Chinese fit the bill. Unfortunately, though the Chines were hard workers they were also quite litigious and when the plantation owners didn't keep their part of the work contracts the Chinese sued them, and frequently won. Lawmakers in California had managed to pass laws that didn't allow the Chinese to sue saying a person who was ineligible to become a naturalized citizen had no believability in court. But US courts were keeping a close watch on the actions of former slave owners, so they supported the Chinese in the south.
Then as now people were pushing to make the 14th amendment not apply to children born in America of Chinese parents. They didn't want these children to have automatic citizenship. They lost that fight.
While many many more male than female Chinese immigrated to America (even though the Tong made their living by importing prostitutes - or rather women forced into prostitution), but female Irish immigrants outnumbered male Irish 2 to one; so intermarriage between Chinese and Irish was common, especially in the south and north.

Very interesting facts from you reading, Joyce! Thanks for sharing them.

Even though I feel that Shanghai Girls is a somewhat contrived story, it is educational in a"novel" sort of way (pun intended!).

I never before knew (much less considered) that the Chinese in San Francisco back in the mid twentieth century faced such harsh discrimination. Perhaps, again, that may have been because it was not something about which I thought. My personal interaction with the Chinese population has been in recent years as the county in which I live (Montgomery County, Maryland, USA) has a huge and diverse population. The Chinese population here values education, and the Chinese (as well as our Asian population in general), succeeds very well in school, mostly scoring higher grades than our Caucasian population.

*sigh* ...but when, oh, when are Americans going to stop comparing every minute aspect of our different races? Aren't we all Americans by now?

P.S. Interesting fact: My daughter studied Mandarin Chinese while in high school.

January is almost finished, but I have Bouncing Pearls on my "to-read" list.

I spent two years in Beijing (where I met my wife; although she is a Dominican from N.Y but that's another story) and love to read the poems, especially from the Tang Dynasty :)

My mum was also born in Taiwan ^_^

> 88

I'm interested in your comments about our Chinese reads, Linux Lefty.

What did you do in Beijing? Did you teach English? It seems as if everyone I know who spent time in China from the U.S. was there for an extended period to teach English! :)

Do you speak Chinese? if so, what dialect?

> 89

I studied Mandarin for about 6 months and stayed with a host family. Afterwards, I taught English ( I met my wife who was a fellow teacher ) and also did programming. I'm not even close to being fluent, but I learned enough to make casual conversation, read signs and navigate around the city. Biking in Beijing is fun :D

As far as the reads on this thread, I'm afraid that ( and slightly embarrassed ), that I can't really comment on those books. I'm not very well read ( although I'm working to change that ). Many of the books look fascinating and I've added some to my to-read list.

> 90

Not to worry. Your comments will be enjoyed at any time in the future that you do read any of the books mentioned above.

There are two books you might specifically enjoy based on your own personal experience of teaching English in China. Those are Iron and Silk and Kosher Chinese. Check them out.

#87: I am always amazed at how the people in my grandparents' time differentiated among themselves based on which European country they came from. Where they lived (South-Central Texas), there were Polish towns, German towns, etc., and they could tell each other apart (!!) and had slightly rude names for the other groups. Even before communities were racially diverse, people found ways to discriminate based on family origin.

Happy Chinese New Year, everyone! Today begins the Year of the Dragon.

Find out in what animal year you were born according to the Chinese calendar. I was born in the year of the pig/boar! :)

:( I'm a dog. Now, while I like dogs very much, that particular stereotype does not come off well in Dreams of Joy - likeable, adaptable, self-serving sycophants who can bite.

Even more about the Chinese zodiac. If I weren't so lazy, I'd try to figure out what the full 4 Pillars are for my birthday. (it always amuses me that folks try to guess my Western zodiac identity and almost always get it wrong. Especially, recently, a particularly flighty girl who insisted that everything about a person could be told by their primary zodiac sign. Took her 5 guesses to give up and ask me when I was born... I don't think but two or three of the descriptors for the Rat on Wikipedia fit me, for that matter.)

There was a documentary about the experience of being mixed race in Britain which I watched a few months ago - I'm not, but a lot of my family are and it looks likely to become more mixed up in the next generation. My dad's second wife, the mother of my brother and sister (one set), is Chinese.

Apparently, for much of the 20th century, white British women who married "aliens" here, such as Chinese seamen, lost their citizenship (though that didn't happen the other way round). I believe that didn't change until shockingly late.

white British women who married "aliens" here, such as Chinese seamen, lost their citizenship (though that didn't happen the other way round).

So that situation wasn't only racist, it was also sexist.

While I've been horrified at the virulent discrimination against Mexican immigrants in the US, I didn't realize how much it compared to the same attitudes expressed toward Chinese here throughout the ages. Today I read: Racial and ethnic tensions simmer just below the surface in virtually all multi ethnic societies, but it usually takes an economic crisis to blow off the lid of civility and allow deep-seated hatred to degenerate into violence. When our livelihoods are at stake, when we are desperate, when families are uncertain where their next meal is coming from, when adults fear for the futures of their children, it is natural to ask why fortune has created us so cruelly. An in these moments, we are all vulnerable to explanations that easily assign blame to some outside group. Keep us at each other's throats, and those at the top can stay at the top. It's too bad it is so intrinsically easy to hate the "other."

The RL book club read Massacred for Gold about 30 Chinese miners killed in Hell's Canyon in Idaho in 1887. It wasn't considered a crime to kill Chinese, so while several of the perpetrators were tried, none were convicted. One later did time for horse theft (a much more serious crime). The book is a bit choppy, but I still learned a lot about the Chinese immigrants and the labor companies who contracted workers (many whose names not even the Labor Companies knew) to the railways, mines and canneries.

DD & I went to the yearly Chinese Remembering gathering in Lewistown, Idaho where we heard several really amazing speakers on the Chinese immigrant experience. I'd highly recommend the event to anyone with an interest in the Chinese immigrants in the Northwest.

Here's a link to the info from the 2011 Remembering along with a very haunting song based on the deathbed confession of one of the murderers. He was 16 at the time of the massacre and died a few laters later (of diptheria?). Highly recommended experience. http://www.rgregorynokes.com/Chinese-Remembering/ChineseRemembering.html

Thanks for posting the link, Streamsong. That's a great song.

Joyce --

I just wanted to say thanks for this TIOLI category and for pointing me toward Factory Girls -- I doubt I would have come across it on my own, and I'm really enjoying it. Happily, I have two more days to finish it....

Isn/t Factory Girls a great surprise? I just happened to stumble upon it at my local library - a fortunate accident.

I finished a second book for this category - Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. Not an easy read but I really liked it.

I loved Factory Girls too, so thank you for this challenge. I was talking about it to my mum, who has read it too, about how well done it was, such a good balance between solid research and accessibility. (The book is very much in my mum's academic field).

After listening to Out of Mao's Shadow and the book I'm currently listening to Walking Dragon I have more of an answer to why the Chinese don't revolt. They do, but China has been refining its bureaucracy over 5000 years, and it's very effective at maintaining the status quo. China has a constitution and it has laws, even environmental laws. Everything looks honky dory on paper. The problem is that Mao destroyed the judicial system and it didn't re emerge until the 1990's and judges don't even have to be lawyers. In fact they usually aren't. Under China's one party system they're just loyal party members who are appointed by party chiefs, so it's very unusual to give out verdicts that go against the party bosses. The bosses have a great deal of autonomy. They're given quotas and how they fill them is their own decision. They hire thugs to beat up, rape or kill people who don't agree, and the party's excellent propaganda machine covers everything up. But the peasants, those former darlings of Mao's whom he screwed while he was in power and the party continues to screw now, are fighting back. They're fighting against forced abortion and forced sterilization, which again is against the law but done at party bosses discretion. They're fighting against taxes which are far higher for the peasants than for city dwellers. They fighting the lack of jobs and health care. There are brave groups of lawyers and journalists who assist them - but they're up against a giant system. As one activist said, "Maybe in my lifetime we'll have equality." But he didn't say it with a great deal of hope.

I'm glad you liked Factory Girls, elkiedee, and I also am glad I did this challenge. I feel much more aware of, and alas, much more afraid of what is going on in the world.

I just finished The Modern Scholar: Waking Dragon: The Emerging Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the World by Professor Peter Navarro who says there are almost 100,000 riots and demonstrations in China a year. They're trying to achieve some democratic government, which, alas, he says contributes to the instability of China today.

I missed being born in the year of the dragon by a mere year. Instead I was born in the year of the snake. I always thought this was grossly unfair as a child whenever we talked about Chinese New Year in school. I am terrified of snakes.

Too late for the TIOLI challenge, but I am now well into, and enjoying, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper - the memoir of a young English woman who went to Sichuan province in the early 1990s originally to study the treatment of minorities in China, but who soon became fascinated by Chinese food and cooking. She ended up staying and studying to be a chef in Sichuan, as well as travelling throughout the country and exploring the different regional cuisines and cultures. The focus on the food does not mean she is ignoring the political situation and the far-reaching changes beginning to take place at that period, but gives an interesting perspective on those changes.