Download or read book Being Chinese written by Wei Djao and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese have traveled the globe for centuries, and today people of Chinese ancestry live all over the world. They are the Huayi or "Chinese overseas" and can be found not only in the thriving Chinese communities of the United States, Canada, and Southeast, but also in enclaves as far-reaching as Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Peru. In this book, twenty-two Chinese living and working outside of ChinaÑordinary people from all walks of lifeÑtell us something about their lives and about what it means to be Chinese in non-Chinese societies. In these pages we meet a surgeon raised in Singapore but westernized in London who still believes in the value of Chinese medicine, which "revitalizes you in ways that Western medicine cannot understand." A member of the Chinese Canadian community who bridles at the insistence that you can't be Chinese unless you speak a Chinese dialect, because "Even though I do not have the Chinese language, I think my ability to manifest many things in Chinese culture to others in English is still very important." Individuals all loyal to their countries of citizenship who continue to observe the customs of their ancestral home to varying degrees, whether performing rites in memory of ancestors, practicing fengshui, wearing jade for good luck, or giving out red packets of lucky money for New Year. What emerges from many of these accounts is a selective adherence to Chinese values. One person cites a high regard for elders, for high achievement, and for the sense of togetherness fostered by his culture. Another, the bride in an arranged marriage to a transplanted Chinese man, speaks highly of her relationship: "It's the Chinese way to put in the effort and persevere." Several of the stories consider the difference between how Chinese women overseas actually live and the stereotypes of how they ought to live. One writes: "Coming from a traditional Chinese family, which placed value on sons and not on daughters, it was necessary for me to assert my own direction in life rather than to follow in the traditional paths of obedience." Bracketing the testimonies are an overview of the history of emigration from China and an assessment of the extent to which the Chinese overseas retain elements of Chinese culture in their lives. In compiling these personal accounts, Wei Djao, who was born in China and now lives near Seattle, undertook a quest that took her not only to many countries but also to the inner landscapes of the heart. Being Chinese is a highly personal book that bares the aspirations, despairs, and triumphs of real people as it makes an insightful and lasting contribution to Chinese diasporic studies.
Download or read book Lessons in Being Chinese written by Mette Halskov Hansen and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comparative study of the Naxi and Tai minority groups in Southwestern China examines the implementation and reception of state minority education policy. Hansen (Center for Development and the Environment, U. of Oslo) argues that state policy is not uniformly successful among all minorities, no
Download or read book Being Chinese written by Helene Wong and published by Bridget Williams Books. This book was released on 2016-05-09 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of a quest I began three decades ago – the search for my Chinese identity. The path I travelled was not linear, and the years brought pain as well as joy. But, while this is a narrative about being Chinese and also a New Zealander, I know that the search for purpose and meaning in life is universal. I hope that others in our culturally diverse society will find their own ways to embark on that same journey. Helene Wong was born in New Zealand in 1949, to parents whose families had emigrated from China one or two generations earlier. Preferring invisibility, she grew up resisting her Chinese identity. But in 1980 she travelled to her father’s home village in southern China and came face to face with her ancestral past. What followed was a journey to come to terms with ‘being Chinese’. Helene Wong writes eloquently about her New Zealand childhood, about student life in the 1960s, and coming of age in Muldoon’s New Zealand. What her Chinese ancestry means to her gradually illuminates the book as it sheds new light on her own life. Drawing on her experience of writing for New Zealand films, she takes the narrative forward through the places of her family’s history – the ancestral village of Sha Tou in Zengcheng county, the rural town of Utiku where the Wongs ran a thriving business, the Lower Hutt suburbs of her childhood, and Avalon and Naenae.
Download or read book Being Chinese in Canada written by William Ging Wee Dere and published by Douglas & McIntyre. This book was released on 2019-03-02 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part memoir, part history, Being Chinese in Canada explores systemic discrimination against the Chinese Canadian community and the effects of the redress movement.
Download or read book House Home Family written by Ronald G. Knapp and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the work of scholars in anthropology, architecture, art, art history, geography, and history, this book explores and analyzes the functional, social, and symbolic attributes of Chinese dwellings. It clarifies the diverse nature of house, home, and family in China.
Download or read book American Born Chinese written by Gene Luen Yang and published by First Second. This book was released on 2006-09-06 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tour-de-force by rising indy comics star Gene Yang, American Born Chinese tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he's the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, who is ruining his cousin Danny's life with his yearly visits. Their lives and stories come together with an unexpected twist in this action-packed modern fable. American Born Chinese is an amazing ride, all the way up to the astonishing climax. American Born Chinese is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, an Eisner Award nominee for Best Coloring and a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year. This title has Common Core Connections
Download or read book Beijing Payback written by Daniel Nieh and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Propulsive. . . . Highly enjoyable. . . . It sets up a sequel, one that I very much look forward to reading.” —The New York Times Book Review A fresh, smart, and fast-paced revenge thriller about a college basketball player who discovers shocking truths about his family in the wake of his father’s murder Victor Li is devastated by his father’s murder, and shocked by a confessional letter he finds among his father’s things. In it, his father admits that he was never just a restaurateur—in fact he was part of a vast international crime syndicate that formed during China’s leanest communist years. Victor travels to Beijing, where he navigates his father’s secret criminal life, confronting decades-old grudges, violent spats, and a shocking new enterprise that the organization wants to undertake. Standing up against it is likely what got his father killed, but Victor remains undeterred. He enlists his growing network of allies and friends to finish what his father started, no matter the costs.
Download or read book A Matter of Honour written by Yoon Jung Park and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The South African-born Chinese community is a tiny one, consisting of 10,000-12,000 members in a population of approximately 45 million. Throughout much of the history of this race-conscious country, this community has been ignored or neglected and officially classed along with people of mixed race or with Indians in the South African category of "Asiatic." Shaped by both external and internal forces, Chinese identities in South Africa are beginning to receive more media and scholarly attention as China's aid, trade, and investment in Africa grow and large numbers of new Chinese immigrants stream into South Africa and other African states. A Matter of Honour examines the shifting social, ethnic, racial, and national identities of Chinese South Africans over time. Using concepts of identity, ethnicity, race, nationalism, and transnationalism, and drawing on comparisons with other overseas Chinese communities, it explores the multilayered identities of the South African group and analyzes the ways in which their identities have altered with each generation. Yoon Jung Park's study breaks away from the often-narrow inquiries into ethnic and national identity in South Africa, offering valuable new perspectives on this shifting terrain of study. Book jacket.
Download or read book How I Survived a Chinese Reeducation Camp written by Gulbahar Haitiwaji and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first memoir about the "reeducation" camps by a Uyghur woman. “I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.” — Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to “reeducation camps.” The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by the New York Times in 2019, expose the brutal repression of the Uyghur ethnicity by means of forced mass detention—the biggest since the time of Mao. Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uyghur woman to write a memoir about the 'reeducation' camps. For three years Haitiwaji endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, and nights under blinding neon light in her prison cell. These camps are to China what the Gulags were to the USSR. The Chinese government denies that they are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism,” and calls them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter. Her courageous memoir is a terrifying portrait of the atrocities she endured in the Chinese gulag and how the treatment of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government is just the latest example of their oppression of independent minorities within Chinese borders. The Xinjiang region where the Uyghurs live is where the Chinese government wishes there to be a new “silk route,” connecting Asia to Europe, considered to be the most important political project of president Xi Jinping.
Download or read book Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities written by Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together new theoretical perspectives and bilingual education models from different sociopolitical and cultural contexts across the globe in order to address the importance of sociocultural, educational and linguistic environments that create, enhance or limit the ways in which diasporic children and young people acquire the ‘Chinese’ language. The chapters present a variety of research-based studies on Chinese heritage language education and bilingual education drawing on detailed investigations of formal and informal educational input including language socialization in families, community heritage language schools and government sponsored educational institutions. Exploring the many pathways of learning ‘Chinese’ and being ‘Chinese’, this volume also examines the complex nature of language acquisition and development, involving language attitudes and ideologies as well as linguistic practices and identity formation. Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities is intended for researchers, teacher-educators, students and practitioners in the fields of Chinese language education and bilingual education and more broadly those concerned with language policy studies and sociolinguistics.
Download or read book Objectifying China Imagining America written by Caroline Frank and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the ever-expanding presence of China in the global economy, Americans more and more look east for goods and trade. But as Caroline Frank reveals, this is not a new development. China loomed as large in the minds—and account books—of eighteenth-century Americans as it does today. Long before they had achieved independence from Britain and were able to sail to Asia themselves, American mariners, merchants, and consumers were aware of the East Indies and preparing for voyages there. Focusing on the trade and consumption of porcelain, tea, and chinoiserie, Frank shows that colonial Americans saw themselves as part of a world much larger than just Britain and Europe Frank not only recovers the widespread presence of Chinese commodities in early America and the impact of East Indies trade on the nature of American commerce, but also explores the role of the this trade in American state formation. She argues that to understand how Chinese commodities fueled the opening acts of the Revolution, we must consider the power dynamics of the American quest for china—and China—during the colonial period. Filled with fresh and surprising insights, this ambitious study adds new dimensions to the ongoing story of America’s relationship with China.
Download or read book Being Chinese written by Wei Djao and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2003-09-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese have traveled the globe for centuries, and today people of Chinese ancestry live all over the world. They are the Huayi or "Chinese overseas" and can be found not only in the thriving Chinese communities of the United States, Canada, and Southeast, but also in enclaves as far-reaching as Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Peru. In this book, twenty-two Chinese living and working outside of China—ordinary people from all walks of life—tell us something about their lives and about what it means to be Chinese in non-Chinese societies. In these pages we meet a surgeon raised in Singapore but westernized in London who still believes in the value of Chinese medicine, which "revitalizes you in ways that Western medicine cannot understand." A member of the Chinese Canadian community who bridles at the insistence that you can't be Chinese unless you speak a Chinese dialect, because "Even though I do not have the Chinese language, I think my ability to manifest many things in Chinese culture to others in English is still very important." Individuals all loyal to their countries of citizenship who continue to observe the customs of their ancestral home to varying degrees, whether performing rites in memory of ancestors, practicing fengshui, wearing jade for good luck, or giving out red packets of lucky money for New Year. What emerges from many of these accounts is a selective adherence to Chinese values. One person cites a high regard for elders, for high achievement, and for the sense of togetherness fostered by his culture. Another, the bride in an arranged marriage to a transplanted Chinese man, speaks highly of her relationship: "It's the Chinese way to put in the effort and persevere." Several of the stories consider the difference between how Chinese women overseas actually live and the stereotypes of how they ought to live. One writes: "Coming from a traditional Chinese family, which placed value on sons and not on daughters, it was necessary for me to assert my own direction in life rather than to follow in the traditional paths of obedience." Bracketing the testimonies are an overview of the history of emigration from China and an assessment of the extent to which the Chinese overseas retain elements of Chinese culture in their lives. In compiling these personal accounts, Wei Djao, who was born in China and now lives near Seattle, undertook a quest that took her not only to many countries but also to the inner landscapes of the heart. Being Chinese is a highly personal book that bares the aspirations, despairs, and triumphs of real people as it makes an insightful and lasting contribution to Chinese diasporic studies.
Download or read book Being Chinese Becoming Chinese American written by Shehong Chen and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-03-20 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1911 revolution in China sparked debates that politicized and divided Chinese communities in the United States. People in these communities affirmed traditional Chinese values and expressed their visions of a modern China, while nationalist feelings emboldened them to stand up for their rights as an integral part of American society. When Japan threatened the China's young republic, the Chinese response in the United States revealed the limits of Chinese nationalism and the emergence of a Chinese American identity. Shehong Chen investigates how Chinese immigrants to the United States transformed themselves into Chinese Americans during the crucial period between 1911 and 1927. Chen focuses on four essential elements of a distinct Chinese American identity: support for republicanism over the restoration of monarchy; a wish to preserve Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture; support for Christianity, despite a strong anti-Christian movement in China; and opposition to the Nationalist party's alliance with the Soviet Union and cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party. Sensitive and enlightening, Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American documents how Chinese immigrants survived exclusion and discrimination, envisioned and maintained Chineseness, and adapted to American society.
Download or read book Being Maori Chinese written by Manying Ip and published by Auckland University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being Maori-Chinese uses extensive interviews with seven different families to explore historical and contemporary relations between Maori and Chinese, a subject which has never been given serious study before. A full chapter is given to each family which is explored in depth often in the voices of the protagonists themselves. This detailed and personal approach shows how in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Maori and Chinese, both relegated to the fringes of society, often had warm and congenial bonds, with intermarriage and large Maori-Chinese families. However in recent times the relationship between these two rapidly growing groups has shown tension as Maori have gained confidence in their identity and as increased Asian immigration has become a political issue. Being Maori-Chinese provides a unique and fascinating insight into cross-cultural alliances between Asian and indigenous peoples, revealing a resilience which has endured persecution, ridicule and neglect and offering a picture of New Zealand society which challenges the usual Pakeha-dominated perspective. Today's Maori-Chinese, especially younger members, are increasingly reaffirming their multiple roots and, with a growing confidence in the cultural advantages they possess, are playing important roles in New Zealand society.
Download or read book Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics written by Yasheng Huang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a story of two Chinas – an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China. In the 1980s, rural China gained the upper hand. In the 1990s, urban China triumphed. In the 1990s, the Chinese state reversed many of its rural experiments, with long-lasting damage to the economy and society. A weak financial sector, income disparity, rising illiteracy, productivity slowdowns, and reduced personal income growth are the product of the capitalism with Chinese characteristics of the 1990s and beyond. While GDP grew quickly in both decades, the welfare implications of growth differed substantially. The book uses the emerging Indian miracle to debunk the widespread notion that democracy is automatically anti-growth. As the country marked its 30th anniversary of reforms in 2008, China faces some of its toughest economic challenges and substantial vulnerabilities that require fundamental institutional reforms.
Download or read book At America s Gates written by Erika Lee and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004-01-21 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before. Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.
Download or read book Lessons in Being Chinese written by Mette Halskov Hansen and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two very different ethnic minority communities—the Naxi of the Lijiang area in northern Yunnan and the Tai (Dai) of Sipsong Panna (Xishuangbanna), along Yunnan’s border with Burma and Laos—are featured in this comparative study of the implementation and reception of state minority education policy in the People’s Republic of China. Based on field research and historical sources, Lessons in Being Chinese argues that state policy, which is intended to be applied uniformly across all minority regions, in fact is much more successful in some than in others. In Lijiang, elite members of the Naxi ethnic group (minzu) have a centuries-old connection with Chinese state educational systems as avenues to social mobility, and have continued this tradition under Communist rule. They participate enthusiastically in the present system, using education to gain official and professional positions. In contrast to the Lijiang area, Sipsong Panna functioned in many ways as a separate kingdom until 1950, with its own script and a separate educational system centered in Theravada Buddhist monasteries. Today, many Tai in that area still prefer monastic education for their sons, and most parents are indifferent to state education. This study finds that standardized, homogenizing state education is in itself incapable of instilling in students an identification with the Chinese state, ironically often increasing ethnic identity. Lessons in Being Chinese enhances our understanding of how state policy toward minorities works in many areas of life, and its conclusions can be extended well beyond the sphere of education. It will be of interest to both anthropologists and educators.
