Download or read book Life and Death in Shanghai written by Cheng Nien and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A woman who spent more than six years in solitary confinement during Communist China's Cultural Revolution discusses her time in prison. Reissue. A New York Times Best Book of the Year.
Download or read book Life and Death in Shanghai written by Nien Cheng and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The national bestselling memoir of a woman’s resistance and struggles in Communist China—“an absorbing story of resourcefulness and courage” (The New York Times). A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR In August 1966, a group of Red Guards ransacked the home of Nien Cheng. Her background made her an obvious target for the fanatics of the Cultural Revolution: educated in London, the widow of an official of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, and an employee of Shell Oil. When she refused to confess that any of this made her an enemy of the state, she was placed in solitary confinement, where she would remain for more than six years. Life and Death in Shanghai recounts the story of Nien Cheng’s imprisonment—a time of extreme deprivation which she met with heroic resistance—as well as her quest for justice when she was released. It is also the story of a country torn apart by Mao Zedong’s vicious campaign to topple party moderates. An incisive, personal account of a terrifying chapter in twentieth-century history, Life and Death in Shanghai is also an astounding portrait of one woman’s courage.
Download or read book Last Boat Out of Shanghai written by Helen Zia and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic real life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China’s 1949 Communist revolution—a heartrending precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today. “A true page-turner . . . [Helen] Zia has proven once again that history is something that happens to real people.”—New York Times bestselling author Lisa See NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY Shanghai has historically been China’s jewel, its richest, most modern and westernized city. The bustling metropolis was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao’s proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to fled in every direction. Seventy years later, members of the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have revealed their stories to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia, who interviewed hundreds of exiles about their journey through one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. From these moving accounts, Zia weaves together the stories of four young Shanghai residents who wrestled with the decision to abandon everything for an uncertain life as refugees in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States. Benny, who as a teenager became the unwilling heir to his father’s dark wartime legacy, must decide either to escape to Hong Kong or navigate the intricacies of a newly Communist China. The resolute Annuo, forced to flee her home with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation from the U.S. in order to continue his studies while his family struggles at home. And Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America. The lives of these men and women are marvelously portrayed, revealing the dignity and triumph of personal survival. Herself the daughter of immigrants from China, Zia is uniquely equipped to explain how crises like the Shanghai transition affect children and their families, students and their futures, and, ultimately, the way we see ourselves and those around us. Last Boat Out of Shanghai brings a poignant personal angle to the experiences of refugees then and, by extension, today. “Zia’s portraits are compassionate and heartbreaking, and they are, ultimately, the universal story of many families who leave their homeland as refugees and find less-than-welcoming circumstances on the other side.”—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club
Download or read book Scythe and the City written by Christian Henriot and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-18 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The issue of death has loomed large in Chinese cities in the modern era. Throughout the Republican period, Shanghai swallowed up lives by the thousands. Exposed bodies strewn around in public spaces were a threat to social order as well as to public health. In a place where every group had its own beliefs and set of death and funeral practices, how did they adapt to a modern, urbanized environment? How did the interactions of social organizations and state authorities manage these new ways of thinking and acting? Recent historiography has almost completely ignored the ways in which death created such immense social change in China. Now, Scythe and the City corrects this problem. Christian Henriot's pioneering and original study of Shanghai between 1865 and 1965 offers new insights into this crucial aspect of modern society in a global commercial hub and guides readers through this tumultuous era that radically redefined the Chinese relationship with death.
Download or read book Death In Shanghai An Inspector Danilov Historical Thriller Book 1 written by M J Lee and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shanghai, 1928. The body of a blonde is washed up on the Beach of Dead Babies, in the heart of the smog-filled city. Seemingly a suicide, a closer inspection reveals a darker motive: the corpse has been weighed down, it’s lower half mutilated...and the Chinese character for ‘justice’ carved into the chest.
Download or read book The Last Kings of Shanghai written by Jonathan Kaufman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.
Download or read book Blood Red Sunset written by Ma Bo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1996-07-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing first hand account of China's Cultural Revolution that joins the ranks of great memoirs such as Life and Death in Shanghai, Wild Swans and A Chinese Odyssey First banned in its native land, this earthy, unflinching memoir has become one of the biggest bestsellers in the history of China. In 1968, a fervent young Red Guard joined the army of hotheaded adolescents who trekked to Inner Mongolia to spread the Cultural Revolution. After gaining a reputation as a brutal abuser of the local herd owners and nomads, Ma Bo casually criticized a Party Leader. Denounced as an “active counterrevolutionary” and betrayed by his friends, the idealistic youth was brutally beaten and imprisoned. Charged with passion, never doctrinaire, Blood Red Sunset is a startlingly vivid and personal narrative that opens a window on the psyche of totalitarian excess that no other work of history can provide. This is a tale of ideology and disillusionment, a powerful work of political and literary importance. “A deceptively straightforward story carried forward by deep currents of insight.”—The Washington Post “A genuine, no-holds-barred, unadorned piece of writing…echoing the realities of contemporary China.”—Liu Binyan, The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Empire Made Me written by Robert A. Bickers and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This riveting "biography of a nobody" offers a rare view of empire from the bottom up and a glimpse of the making of modern China. Robert Bickers mines the letters of Richard Tinkler along with archival files to create a fascinating and much-needed narrative of everyday life in the colonial world and an unvarnished portrait of the colonial experience that will permanently affect our view of it.
Download or read book Remembering Shanghai written by Isabel Sun Chao and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A volume that demands to be held." --Los Angeles Review of Books True stories of glamour, drama, and tragedy told through five generations of a Shanghai family, from the last days of imperial rule to the Cultural Revolution. A high position bestowed by China's empress dowager grants power and wealth to the Sun family. For Isabel, growing up in glamorous 1930s and '40s Shanghai, it is a life of utmost privilege. But while her scholar father and fashionable mother shelter her from civil war and Japanese occupation, they cannot shield the family forever. When Mao comes to power, eighteen-year-old Isabel journeys to Hong Kong, not realizing that she will make it her home--and that she will never see her father again. She returns to Shanghai fifty years later with her daughter, Claire, to confront their family's past--one they discover is filled with love and betrayal, kidnappers and concubines, glittering palaces and underworld crime bosses. Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai follows five generations from a hardscrabble village to the bright lights of Hong Kong. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity, loss, and redemption against an epic backdrop. WINNER OF 20 LITERARY AND DESIGN AWARDS, INCLUDING: Writer's Digest GRAND PRIZE Rubery Book Award BOOK OF THE YEAR IAN Independent Author Network OUTSTANDING MEMOIR IPPY Independent Publisher Book Awards BEST FIRST BOOK Reader Views GLOBAL AWARD
Download or read book The Suicide of Miss Xi written by Bryna Goodman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A suicide scandal in Shanghai reveals the social fault lines of democratic visions in China's troubled Republic in the early 1920s. On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked. Although her death occurred outside of Chinese jurisdiction, her US-educated employer, Tang Jiezhi, was kidnapped by Chinese authorities and put on trial. In the unfolding scandal, novelists, filmmakers, suffragists, reformers, and even a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party seized upon the case as emblematic of deep social problems. Xi's family claimed that Tang had pressured her to be his concubine; his conviction instead for financial fraud only stirred further controversy. The creation of a republic ten years earlier had inspired a vision of popular sovereignty and citizenship premised upon gender equality and legal reform. After the quick suppression of the first Chinese parliament, commercial circles took up the banner of democracy in their pursuit of wealth. But, Bryna Goodman shows, the suicide of an educated "new woman" exposed the emptiness of republican democracy after a flash of speculative finance gripped the city. In the shadow of economic crisis, Tang's trial also exposed the frailty of legal mechanisms in a political landscape fragmented by warlords and enclaves of foreign colonial rule. The Suicide of Miss Xi opens a window onto how urban Chinese in the early twentieth century navigated China's early passage through democratic populism, in an ill-fated moment of possibility between empire and party dictatorship. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken promises of citizen's rights, gender equality, and financial prosperity betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.
Download or read book Miracles of Life written by J. G. Ballard and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2008 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One Of Britain S Most Significant Writers. Beginning With The Events That Inspired His Classic Novel, Empire Of The Sun, Turned Into An Acclaimed Film By Steven Spielberg, In This Revelatory Autobiography Ballard Charts The Course Of His Astonishing Life: His Early Childhood Spent Exploring Pre-War Shanghai, The Deprivations And Unexpected Freedoms Of The Lunghua Camp, To His Return To A Britain Physically And Psychologically Crippled By War. He Explores His Subsequent Involvement In The Dramatic Social Changes Of The 1960S, And The Adjustments To Life Following The Premature Death Of His Wife. In Prose Displaying His Characteristic Precision And Eye For Detail, Ballard Recounts The Experiences Which Would Fundamentally Shape His Writing, While Providing A Striking Social Analysis Of Post-War Britain. Miracles Of Life Is An Utterly Captivating Account Of An Extraordinary Writer'S Extraordinary Life. 'Exquisitely Written...A Subtle, Restlessly Enquiring Work Of Touching Humanity, Is Ballard'S Crowning Achievement.' Financial Times.
Download or read book Stateless in Shanghai written by Liliane Willens and published by . This book was released on 2015-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Born in Shanghai to Jewish Russian parents who fled the Bolshevik Revolution, Liliane Willens is a "stateless" girl in the world's most cosmopolitan city. But when the Far East explodes in conflict, the family's uncertain status puts them at risk of being stranded, or worse. Stateless in Shanghai recounts Willens' life and trials in a China collapsing under the weight of foreign invaders and civil war."--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Shanghai Girls written by Lisa See and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two sisters leave Shanghai to find new lives in 1930s Los Angeles in this fresh, fascinating adventure.
Download or read book Disappearing Shanghai written by Xiaolong Qiu and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a photographic exploration of life in the old and rapidly disappearing quarters of Shanghai, with accompanying poems and essays by the author of fiction and poetry, Qiu Xiaolong. The photographs, all taken in a documentary style over a period of five years, represent an intimate and invaluable visual natural history of a way of life in the workers’ quarters and other central districts of the city that held sway throughout the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st century, before yielding to the ambitious ongoing efforts at urban reconstruction. Mr. Qiu, whose best-known books are largely set in this old city, where his protagonist Inspector Chen walks around in investigations, is suited like few others to provide a lyrical accompanying text whose purpose is to celebrate the life, beauty and texture of this world before it has vanished altogether. No photographer has pursued this subject with more dedication and persistence than Mr. French, whose photographs of Shanghai have been exhibited on four continents. Taken together, the work of these two contributors offers compelling esthetics and lasting historical value for lovers of Shanghai, past, present and future.
Download or read book Survival in Shanghai written by Fred Marcus and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The King of Shanghai written by Ian Hamilton and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2015-01-17 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventh novel in the Ava Lee series finds Ava caught up in the election for the chairmanship of the Triad Societies. It’s been three months since Uncle’s passing, and Ava is finally ready to begin her new life as a partner with May Ling Wong and her sister-in-law Amanda in their Three Sisters venture capital firm. Ava travels to Shanghai to hear a pitch on a new investment possibility: the creation of a fashion line by Clark and Gillian Po. She also meets with the mysterious Xu, a young man Uncle had been mentoring and who is the head of the triad in Shanghai. Xu makes an audacious business proposal that she and May Ling are compelled to consider. Meanwhile, separately and privately, he confides to Ava that he intends to run for the chairmanship of the Triad Societies and attempts to recruit her as his adviser. Against her will, Ava becomes enmeshed in triad warfare and her future is threatened...
Download or read book written by and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A primary theme of the book is the effect of recent and ongoing law reform on Hong Kong commercial law. Many of the authors discuss proposals by the Law Reform Commission or other bodies. The authors also make their own proposals for improving Hong Kong's legislation and case law.
