Download or read book Nanjing Requiem written by Ha Jin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s 1937, and the Japanese are poised to invade Nanjing. Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary and the dean of Jinling Women’s College, decides to remain at the school, convinced that her American citizenship will help her safeguard the welfare of the Chinese men and women who work there. She is painfully mistaken. In the aftermath of the invasion, the school becomes a refugee camp for more than ten thousand homeless women and children, and Vautrin must struggle, day after day, to intercede on the behalf of the hapless victims. Yet even when order and civility are restored, she remains deeply embattled, always haunted by the lives she could not save. At once a searing story that unfurls during one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century and an indelible portrait of a singular and brave woman, Nanjing Requiem is another tour de force from the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting.
Download or read book Nanjing Requiem written by Ha Jin and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2011 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1937 attack on Nanjing, American missionary and women's college dean Minnie Vautrin decides to remain at her school during a violent Japanese attack that renders the school a refugee center for ten thousand women and children.
Download or read book Nanjing Requiem written by Ha Jin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash returns to his homeland in a searing new novel that unfurls during one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century: the Rape of Nanjing. In 1937, with the Japanese poised to invade Nanjing, Minnie Vautrin—an American missionary and the dean of Jinling Women’s College—decides to remain at the school, convinced that her American citizenship will help her safeguard the welfare of the Chinese men and women who work there. She is painfully mistaken. In the aftermath of the invasion, the school becomes a refugee camp for more than ten thousand homeless women and children, and Vautrin must struggle, day after day, to intercede on behalf of the hapless victims. Even when order and civility are eventually restored, Vautrin remains deeply embattled, and she is haunted by the lives she could not save. With extraordinarily evocative precision, Ha Jin re-creates the terror, the harrowing deprivations, and the menace of unexpected violence that defined life in Nanjing during the occupation. In Minnie Vautrin he has given us an indelible portrait of a woman whose convictions and bravery prove, in the end, to be no match for the maelstrom of history. At once epic and intimate, Nanjing Requiem is historical fiction at its most resonant.
Download or read book Under the Red Flag written by Ha Jin and published by Steerforth. This book was released on 1999 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the northern Chinese provincial town of Dismount Fort, these 12 stories offer a fascinating glimpse of the lives of peasants, soldiers, workers, and party officials during the Great Cultural Revolution.
Download or read book The Bridegroom written by Ha Jin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2001-01-16 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the remarkable Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award for his celebrated novel Waiting, a collection of comical and deeply moving tales of contemporary China that are as warm and human as they are surprising, disturbing, and delightful. In the title story, the head of security at a factory is shocked, first when the hansomest worker on the floor proposes marriage to his homely adopted daughter, and again when his new son-in-law is arrested for the "crime" of homosexuality. In "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town," the workers at an American-style fast food franchise receive a hilarious crash course in marketing, deep frying, and that frustrating capitalist dictum, "the customer is always right."Ha Jin has triumphed again with his unforgettable storytelling in The Bridegroom.
Download or read book The Chinese in America written by Iris Chang and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004-03-30 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quintessiantially American story chronicling Chinese American achievement in the face of institutionalized racism by the New York Times bestselling author of The Rape of Nanking In an epic story that spans 150 years and continues to the present day, Iris Chang tells of a people’s search for a better life—the determination of the Chinese to forge an identity and a destiny in a strange land and, often against great obstacles, to find success. She chronicles the many accomplishments in America of Chinese immigrants and their descendents: building the infrastructure of their adopted country, fighting racist and exclusionary laws and anti-Asian violence, contributing to major scientific and technological advances, expanding the literary canon, and influencing the way we think about racial and ethnic groups. Interweaving political, social, economic, and cultural history, as well as the stories of individuals, Chang offers a bracing view not only of what it means to be Chinese American, but also of what it is to be American.
Download or read book A Song Everlasting written by Ha Jin and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the universally admired, National Book Award-winning, bestselling author of Waiting—a timely novel that follows a famous Chinese singer severed from his country, as he works to find his way in the United States At the end of a U.S. tour with his state-supported choir, popular singer Yao Tian takes a private gig in New York to pick up some extra cash for his daughter’s tuition fund, but the consequences of his choice spiral out of control. On his return to China, Tian is informed that the sponsors of the event were supporters of Taiwan’s secession, and that he must deliver a formal self-criticism. When he is asked to forfeit his passport to his employer, Tian impulsively decides instead to return to New York to protest the government’s threat to his artistic integrity. With the help of his old friend Yabin, Tian’s career begins to flourish in the United States. But he is soon placed on a Chinese government blacklist and thwarted by the state at every turn, and it becomes increasingly clear that he may never return to China unless he denounces the freedoms that have made his new life possible. Tian nevertheless insists on his identity as a performer, refusing to give up his art. Moving, important, and strikingly relevant to our times, A Song Everlasting is a story of hope in the face of hardship from one of our most celebrated authors.
Download or read book The Crazed written by Ha Jin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post, Los Angeles times, and San Jose Mercury News Best Book of the Year Ha Jin’s seismically powerful new novel is at once an unblinking look into the bell jar of communist Chinese society and a portrait of the eternal compromises and deceptions of the human state. When the venerable professor Yang, a teacher of literature at a provincial university, has a stroke, his student Jian Wan is assigned to care for him. Since the dutiful Jian plans to marry his mentor’s beautiful, icy daughter, the job requires delicacy. Just how much delicacy becomes clear when Yang begins to rave. Are these just the outpourings of a broken mind, or is Yang speaking the truth—about his family, his colleagues, and his life’s work? And will bearing witness to the truth end up breaking poor Jian’s heart? Combining warmth and intimacy with an unsparing social vision, The Crazed is Ha Jin’s most enthralling book to date.
Download or read book A Good Fall written by Ha Jin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his first book of stories since The Bridegroom, National Book Award-winning author Ha Jin gives us a collection that delves into the experience of Chinese immigrants in America. A lonely composer takes comfort in the antics of his girlfriend's parakeet; young children decide to change their names so they might sound more "American," unaware of how deeply this will hurt their grandparents; a Chinese professor of English attempts to defect with the help of a reluctant former student. All of Ha Jin's characters struggle to remain loyal to their homeland and its traditions while also exploring the freedom that life in a new country offers. Stark, deeply moving, acutely insightful, and often strikingly humorous, A Good Fall reminds us once again of the storytelling prowess of this superb writer.
Download or read book Never Forget National Humiliation written by Zheng Wang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wang follows the Chinese Communist Party's ideological re-education of the public through the exploitation of China's humiliating modern history, tracking the CCP's use of history education to glorify the party, re-establish its legitimacy, consolidate national identity, and justify one-party rule in the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era.
Download or read book A Map of Betrayal written by Ha Jin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year Lilian Shang, a history professor in Maryland, knew that her father, Gary, had been the most important Chinese spy ever caught in the United States. But when she discovers his diary after the death of her parents, its pages reveal the full pain and longing that his double life entailed—and point to a hidden second family that he’d left behind in China. As Lilian follows her father’s trail back into the Chinese provinces, she begins to grasp the extent of her father’s dilemma—torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country. As she starts to understand that Gary, too, had been betrayed, she finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from endangering yet another generation of the Shangs. A stunning portrait of a multinational family, an unflinching inquiry into the meaning of patriotism, A Map of Betrayal is a spy novel that only Ha Jin could write.
Download or read book The Lyrical in Epic Time written by David Der-wei Wang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, David Der-wei Wang uses the lyrical to rethink the dynamics of Chinese modernity. Although the form may seem unusual for representing China's social and political crises in the mid-twentieth century, Wang contends that national cataclysm and mass movements intensified Chinese lyricism in extraordinary ways. Wang calls attention to the form's vigor and variety at an unlikely juncture in Chinese history and the precarious consequences it brought about: betrayal, self-abjuration, suicide, and silence. Despite their divergent backgrounds and commitments, the writers, artists, and intellectuals discussed in this book all took lyricism as a way to explore selfhood in relation to solidarity, the role of the artist in history, and the potential for poetry to illuminate crisis. They experimented with poetry, fiction, film, intellectual treatise, political manifesto, painting, calligraphy, and music. Western critics, Wang shows, also used lyricism to critique their perilous, epic time. He reads Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Cleanth Brooks, and Paul de Man, among others, to complete his portrait. The Chinese case only further intensifies the permeable nature of lyrical discourse, forcing us to reengage with the dominant role of revolution and enlightenment in shaping Chinese—and global—modernity. Wang's remarkable survey reestablishes Chinese lyricism's deep roots in its own native traditions, along with Western influences, and realizes the relevance of such a lyrical calling of the past century to our time.
Download or read book Defining Yongle written by James C. Y. Watt and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2005 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book War Trash written by Ha Jin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed wire, a world where kindness alternates with blinding cruelty and one has infinitely more to fear from one’s fellow prisoners than from the guards. Vivid in its historical detail, profound in its imaginative empathy, War Trash is Ha Jin’s most ambitious book to date.
Download or read book Levels of Life written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes an elegant triptych of history, fiction, and memoir—a "wise, funny, and devastating ... discourse on love and sorrow" (The New York Times Book Review). In this “deeply stirring” book (The Boston Globe), Julian Barnes writes about ballooning and photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and tearing them apart; and enduring after the incomprehensible loss of a loved one. Powerfully rendered, exquisitely crafted in Barnes’s erudite style, this searing work confirms the author as an unparalleled magus of the heart.
Download or read book Lenin s Kisses written by Yan Lianke and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An absurdist masterpiece. A provocative and bitingly humourous tragicomedy of greed and corruption. Lenin's Kisses is a brilliant novel about modern China. Blind, deaf, and disfigured, the 197 citizens of the Village of Liven enjoy a peaceful lifestyle, spared from the government's watchful eye. But when an unseasonal snowstorm wipes out the grain crops, a county official convinces the villagers to set up a travelling freak-show showcasing their disabilities. With the money, he intends to buy Lenin's embalmed corpse from Russia and install it in a mausoleum in the mountains to attract tourism to the sleepy district. Lenin's Kisses is a rollicking tragicomedy with a cast of moving characters, a cautionary tale of the all-consuming desire for power and wealth from one of China's most respected and celebrated writers. Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. Text has published his novels Serve the People! and Dream of Ding Village, which was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Lianke has won two of China's most prestigious literary awards: the Lu Xan Prize and the Lao She Award. He lives in Bejing. textpublishing.com.au 'The novel's depth lies in its ability to express an unbearable sorrow, even while constantly making he reader laugh out loud...a truly miraculous novel.' Hong Kong Ming Pao Weekly 'Yan Lianke sees and describes his characters with great tenderness...this talented and sensitive writer exposes the absurdity of our time.' La Croix 'Yan Lianke weaves a passionate satire of today's China, a marvellous circus where the one-eyed-man is king...Brutal. And wickedly funny.' L'Express 'Lenin's Kisses is a grand comic novel, wild in spirit and inventive in technique. It's a rhapsody that blends the imaginary with the real, raves about the absurd and the truthful, inspires both laughter and tears.' Ha Jin 'Both a blistering satire and a bruising saga, this epic novel by Yan examines the grinding forces of communism and capitalism, and the volatile zone where the two intersect...A heartbreaking story of greed, corruption, and the dangers of utopia.' Publishers Weekly (starred review) 'Set Rabelais down in the mountains of, say, Xinjiang, mix in some Gunter Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and you're in the approximate territory of Lianke's latest exercise in epatering the powers that be...A satirical masterpiece.' Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book The Nile written by Toby Wilkinson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-02-13 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Herodotus's day to the present political upheavals, the steady flow of the Nile has been Egypt's heartbeat. It has shaped its geography, controlled its economy and moulded its civilisation. The same stretch of water which conveyed Pharaonic battleships, Ptolemaic grain ships, Roman troop-carriers and Victorian steamers today carries modern-day tourists past bankside settlements in which rural life – fishing, farming, flooding – continues much as it has for millennia. At this most critical juncture in the country's history, foremost Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes us on a journey up the Nile, north from Lake Victoria, from Cataract to Cataract, past the Aswan Dam, to the delta. The country is a palimpsest, every age has left its trace: as we pass the Nilometer on the island of Elephantine which since the days of the Pharaohs has measured the height of Nile floodwaters to predict the following season's agricultural yield and set the parameters for the entire Egyptian economy, the wonders of Giza which bear the scars of assault by nineteenth-century archaeologists and the modern-day unbridled urban expansion of Cairo – and in Egypt's earliest art (prehistoric images of fish-traps carved into cliffs) and the Arab Spring (fought on the bridges of Cairo) – the Nile is our guide to understanding the past and present of this unique, chaotic, vital, conservative yet rapidly changing land.
