Chinese Books - Page 6

Along the Roaring River: My Wild Ride from Mao to the Met

Hao Jiang Tian

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Along the roaring river is a riveting read 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Hao Jiang Tian's journey is masterfully told in his own voice by Lois Morris. She has captured his electric personality that brought him to America from a time and place steeped in iconic imagery - Mao's oxymoronic cultural revolution that sent intellectuals and artists, such as Tian, to work in fields and factories. It is a story full of losses, near misses and miracles. That Tian has arrived in America to sing Major rolls at the Metropolitan Opera but still holds dear his attachments to his home country is profound and moving. His talent in singing is enormous and is equal only to his talent for sharing his remarkable journey. A must read by a gifted story teller and his equally gifted co-writer Lois Morris.

Editorial Review:

Since his 1991 debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Hao Jiang Tian has appeared on the world’s greatest stages, more than 300 times at the Met alone. How he got there is a drama of bittersweet humor, mortal danger, heartbreaking tragedy, and inspiring triumph—more passionate and turbulent than even the grandest opera. In Along the Roaring River, Tian relives his coming of age in China during the chaotic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and his dramatic journey from hard labor in a Beijing factory to international opera stardom.

Midnight at the Dragon Cafe: A Novel (Alex Awards (Awards))

Judy Fong Bates

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Set in the 1960s, Judy Fong Bates’s much-talked-about debut novel is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a small Ontario town’s solitary Chinese family, whose life is changed over the course of one summer when she learns the burden of secrets. Through Su-Jen’s eyes, the hard life behind the scenes at the Dragon Café unfolds. As Su-Jen’s father works continually for a better future, her mother, a beautiful but embittered woman, settles uneasily into their new life. Su-Jen feels the weight of her mother’s unhappiness as Su-Jen’s life takes her outside the restaurant and far from the customs of the traditional past. When Su-Jen’s half-brother arrives, smouldering under the responsibilities he must bear as the dutiful Chinese son, he forms an alliance with Su-Jen’s mother, one that will have devastating consequences. Written in spare, intimate prose, Midnight at the Dragon Café is a vivid portrait of a childhood divided by two cultures and touched by unfulfilled longings and unspoken secrets.


From the Hardcover edition.

Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation Is Disrupting Global Competition

Ming Zeng; Peter J. Williamson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A.J. 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 5 people found this review helpful.

great book I ever read about the new wave from China , becomes a global leader with the powerful weapon that breaks our conventional rules in strategy. How can they afford high technology, variety & customization, and specialty products without increasing costs? This book can answer every your questions. forget the past that they are producers of cheap, low -quality products.

Everyone who believes the world is flat must read this book..

Editorial Review:

The new competitive challenge from Chinese businesses is like nothing seen by Western companies since the Japanese arrived twenty years ago with their cars and consumer electronics. To fend off these fierce competitors, managers must forget yesterday's image of Chinese companies as producers of cheap, low-quality imitations flooding world markets. In fact, by strategically implementing what the authors call cost innovation, Chinese firms are advancing into high-end products and industries and competing for such high-value activities as engineering, design, and even R&D. The first book to examine this new competitive force, "Dragons at Your Door" exposes the strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of these fast-rising Chinese competitors, surfaces the underlying logic that enables Chinese firms to attack high-end industries, and provides critical new insight into these very different competitors.

Wu: The Chinese Empress Who Schemed, Seduced and Murdered Her Way to Become a Living God

Jonathan Clements

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Wu was the first and only woman in Chinese history to become a reigning empress. Jonathan Clements tells the dramatic and colourful story of the seventh-century daughter of a lumber merchant who used her looks, cunning and connections to rule one of the largest empires of the world.

Before Wu was born, prophecies predicted that she would become an emperor. It was thus a source of disappointment to her family when she turned out to be a girl. But they underestimated Wu's steely determination to succeed. At the age of 13 she took the first steps on her path to power when she was selected as a concubine to the 40-year-old Supreme Emperor (Taizong).

When the emperor fell ill, the ambitious Wu committed a capital crime by seducing his heir. Her gamble paid off, and when the emperor died, his besotted heir, now the High Emperor (Gaozong), rescued Wu from life in a convent. Back in the palace, Wu wasted no time in framing and executing her opposition, the empress and the beautiful Pure Concubine. Her ruthlessness even extended to her own family. After her husband had died, she poisoned her strong-willed eldest son, tried to rule through his two more malleable brothers but eventually took the throne herself.

Coloured by intrigue, murder, incest and seduction, Wu's incredible true story is a rich and fascinating tale. Drawing on the original Chinese sources, Jonathan Clements reveals the life of this extraordinary woman who proclaimed herself a living god, founded a new dynasty and was only deposed, aged 79, after jealous courtiers had murdered her two young lovers.

Kids Like Me in China

Ying Ying Fry, Amy Klatzkin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this first view of China adoption from a child's perspective, eight-year-old Ying Ying Fry returns to her orphanage to remember what it is like and to write a story so that other adopted children will understand where they came from. Kids Like Me in China combines real-life photos with the forthright observations and complex feelings of an adopted child as she meets caregivers and befriends children in the city where her life began. This book will inspire all adopted children to take charge of their own life stories.

Eight-year-old Ying Ying Fry is a Chinese American girl growing up in San Francisco. But her story didn't begin there. Like lots of kids she knows, Ying Ying spent her first months in China--in a birth family she cannot remember and an orphanage in Changsha, Hunan province, where her American parents adopted her when she was a tiny baby.

When Ying Ying goes back to visit Changsha, she can't wait to see her orphanage caregiver--someone who knew her and loved her when she lived in China. Meeting Li Ayi is just the beginning, as Ying Ying discovers points of connection with all the orphanage children--babies, toddlers and school-age kids. Outside the orphanage she visits children at home, at playgrounds and at school, and these friendships too help her see her life story in a new light. A child of two countries, Ying Ying is determined to claim both as her own.

Kids Like Me in China combines real-life photos with the forthright observations and complex feelings of an adopted child as she ponders what her early life might have been like. The first view of China adoption from a child's perspective, Kids Like Me will inspire all adopted children to take charge of their own life stories.

Fun In Chinese Laundry (Lively Arts)

Josef Von Sternberg

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The arts somehow survive when all else has vanished 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

In this magisterial autobiography, Josef von Sternberg reflects about his personal career, film and its history and art.
Von Sternberg will always be remembered for one of the most impressive movies of all times 'Der blaue Engel', but his career covers the sound and silent movie period.

It is a very revealing book, not about his personal life, but about his professional viewpoints and struggles.

His actor's direction was based on a penetrating insight into the real human nature. First, he considered that 'the guinea pig of the artist is his own self' and secondly, that 'the average human being lives behind an impenetrable veil and will disclose his deep emotions only in a crisis which robs him of control'.
His professional life was an enduring fight with
(1) the film studios and its producers. He knew their blatant commercialism: 'If a snail were to offer a contribution of value to Hollywood, it would be located instantly'.
(2) his actors (an E. Jannings or a C. Laughton behaved like bad children on the set. A notable exception was his miraculous actress Marlene Dietrich.)
(3) his rivals within the director's guild.
and ultimately when the movie was produced (4) the moral establishment and its servile movie critics.

Von Sternberg understood the profound impact of the film medium, which revealed 'the real world where wealth and poverty live side by side, and where cruelty and indifference can no longer be ignored.' The medium has an amoral basis: 'the strongest appeal to the masses was the simplest one: the formula always revolves around sex and its biological associate, violence. ... One bond that links all audiences is the animal in man.'

He also gives us a penetrating portrait of some of the greatest masters of cinema: D.W. Griffith ('remove these 10000 horses a trifle to the right'), C. Chaplin ('the comic side of humiliation') or E. von Stroheim ('the intensity of his actor's direction').

His ultimate goal was to create 'art', for 'it is easier to kill than to create.'
The overall picture shows us von Sternberg as a noble, passionate, honest, craftful and extremely intelligent movie director.
This autobiography is part thriller, part melo, part drama, part psychoanalysis.
It is an essential read, not only for the film historian.

The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Philip E. Lilienthal Books in Asian Studies)

Susan Mann

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Stimulating look at the past 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

If you enjoy Chinese history, this is a book you are sure to treasure. The writer takes a slightly novelistic approach [which is carefully explained and justified] to create good history and an amazingly good read. I was sad when I came to the end.

Editorial Review:

The history of China in the nineteenth century usually features men as the dominant figures in a chronicle of warfare, rebellion, and dynastic decline. This book challenges that model and provides a different account of the era, history as seen through the eyes of women. Basing her remarkable study on the poetry and memoirs of three generations of literary women of the Zhang family--Tang Yaoqing, her eldest daughter, and her eldest granddaughter--Susan Mann illuminates a China that has been largely invisible. Drawing on a stunning array of primary materials--published poetry, gazetteer articles, memorabilia--as well as a variety of other historical documents, Mann reconstructs these women's intimate relationships, personal aspirations, values, ideas, and political consciousness. She transforms our understanding of gender relations and what it meant to be an educated woman during China's transition from empire to nation and offers a new view of the history of late imperial women.

The Waiting Child: How the Faith and Love of One Orphan Saved the Life of Another

Cindy Champnella

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Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The inspiring true story of a four-year-old Chinese orphan who convinces her adoptive American family to return to China to rescue the little boy she couldn’t forget

Adopted by an American family at age four, Jaclyn traveled to her new home with a great burden. Her new family had to leave behind a little boy who had been under her charge at the Chinese orphanage where Jaclyn fought the odds against abandonment, institutionalization, and hunger---not for herself, but on behalf of this even smaller child, whom she regarded as her responsibility.

Jaclyn’s saga spans oceans and cultures. The Waiting Child is an extraordinary story of human resilience in the face of profound loss and suffering---and a testament to the ability of a loving heart to prevail over great adversity. Jaclyn’s unshakable determination to bring to her new life the child she had cared for in the institution, the one she believed with all her heart was “her baby,” will change all assumptions made about the human spirit. In the end, this moving story affirms everything that is good and hopeful in life, when, after a two-year effort, the little boy is brought to this country as the adopted son of Jaclyn’s American aunt and uncle.

For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire

James Yee

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Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 2001, Captain James "Yusuf" Yee was commissioned as one of the first Muslim chaplains in the United States Army. After the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, he became a frequent government spokesman, helping to educate soldiers about Islam and build understanding throughout the military. Subsequently, Chaplain Yee was selected to serve as the Muslim Chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, where nearly 700 detainees captured in the war on terror were being held as "unlawful combatants."

In September 2003, after serving at Guantanamo for ten months in a role that gave him unrestricted access to the detainees--and after receiving numerous awards for his service there--Chaplain Yee was secretly arrested on his way to meet his wife and daughter for a routine two-week leave. He was locked away in a navy prison, subject to much of the same treatment that had been imposed on the Guantanamo detainees. Wrongfully accused of spying, and aiding the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Yee spent 76 excruciating days in solitary confinement and was threatened with the death penalty.

After the U.S. government determined it had made a grave mistake in its original allegations, it vindictively charged him with adultery and computer pornography. In the end all criminal charges were dropped and Chaplain Yee's record wiped clean. But his reputation was tarnished, and what has been a promising military career was left in ruins.

Depicting a journey of faith and service, Chaplain Yee's For God and Country is the story of a pioneering officer in the U.S. Army, who became a victim of the post-September 11 paranoia that gripped a starkly fearful nation. And it poses a fundamental question: If our country cannot be loyal to even the most patriotic Americans, can it remain loyal to itself?

Chinese Playground : A Memoir

Bill Lee

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This startling and unsentimental recollection of childhood and coming of age in the back alleys and bustling streets of San Francisco's Chinatown reveals the sinister and pervasive influences of organized crime. Delivering an almost-casual expose into the underworld of an urban Chinatown, "Chinese Playground: A Memoir" traces author Bill Lee's maturation from innocent child in a troubled family to a street punk, gang member, and college graduate struggling to break free of his involvement in escalating violence. In a dark journey spanning forty years, Lee fights an ongoing battle against relentless childhood demons and nightmares, ultimately coming to terms with his past and peace with himself.

Lee's personal accounts of two high-profile murder incidents are engrossing. The 1977 Golden Dragon Massacre in San Francisco that left five dead and eleven wounded, was carried out by his blood-brothers who were engaged in the most violent Asian gang war in U.S. history. A decade later, a mad gunman killed seven and injured four at ESL, a high-tech firm in Sunnyvale, California where Lee was employed. An unlikely hero emerges as he accepts his fate, employing his street instincts to save co-workers during the murderous rampage.

A moving look at the murky histories of Lee's parents -- both Chinese immigrants -- adds depth to this story and poignantly points to typical family dysfunctions that contribute to confusion, fear and aggression in young people. The author's early recollections are seen through the eyes of an innocent boy who was nearly aborted and sold away. As a young gang member, his pain and fears are hidden beneath a tough, macho facade as he contends with gambling, drugs, extortion and murder. Entering adulthood, Lee's street savvy and dark view of the world manifests itself into an aggressive, win-at-any-costs attitude which he unleashes in Silicon Valley. Lee faces his biggest challenge when he returns to the streets of Chinatown in search of his runaway son and confronts his own dark past. Lee's determination to heal his soul and transform his life is inspiring.

This book is a provocative read providing valuable insight into the Chinese-American culture, organized crime, distressed families, at-risk youths, personal recovery, Bay Area history, and Silicon Valley.