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Chinese Mosaic中國故事 is a collection of memoirs, short stories, essays, and columns. Pueblo Chieftain, a daily newspaper in Pueblo, Colorado, published the columns in 1986-1995. The columns and essays introduce variety of subjects of Chinese customs, culture, and history. The memoirs and short stories are true personal experiences and stories of a few Chinese women- historical figures and contemporaries. The author strives to have each piece be dotted with history and customs. She hopes the reader would grasp a clear understanding about the Chinese, the people, the language, and the culture.
An early commentary on one of the Chinese Five Classics
The Documents classic (Shangshu) was central to the political life of imperial China. This owed much to the lively commentarial activity surrounding the text in the first two centuries BCE. The Great Commentary serves as a lens on this commentarial work and reveals how the Documents classic was used to provide answers to pressing societal questions of the time.
In this first English translation of the Great Commentary, Fan Lin and Griet Vankeerberghen engage with the historical realities that produced the work. They explore the complex relationship between the Documents classic and its commentarial traditions at a time when neither classic nor commentary had acquired fixed form. They view Master Fu (260?-161? BCE), the Han court academician to whom the Great Commentary is traditionally ascribed, not as the text's author but rather as the figure who lent his authority to subsequent generations of Documents scholars. Lin and Vankeerberghen also trace how late imperial scholars reconstructed the text largely from fragments in collectanea. With facing pages of Chinese and English text, this volume provides a comprehensive introduction and detailed annotation that reveal the work's relevance to law, prognostication, and politics, along with its value as an important source for the study of the classical tradition and of early Chinese history.
In Limpid Dream presents a group of seventeenth-century Chinese personal essays which explores how we perceive our existence in remembered fragments. It focuses on the Dream Reminiscences of Tao'an (Tao'an mengyi), written by Zhang Dai (1597-1648?). A wealthy literatus, historian, bon vivant, and Ming loyalist, Zhang composed 123 short essays (many translated in this book) after the Ming dynasty fell to the Manchus in 1644. These essays describe Zhang's extravagant life in the prosperous Jiangnan region before the Ming collapse. Because they were written, assembled, and introduced by a single author, these essays give us a vivid glimpse of how shards of personal experience can, in effect, commemorate a personal side of existence normally not acknowledged in more conventional, public biographical forms.
The first part of the book introduces essays on fantastic lantern displays, tranquil snoozes in drifting boats, remarkable objects, shrewd distinctions in social behaviors, crab feasts, quirky relatives, dramatic military exercises, and artifacts of Ming glory -- the things that in memory still provided a sense of shared identity and presence to one who held no office and who had watched his dynasty fall.
The second part of the book begins by questioning the usefulness of the conversational genre of xiaopin, and then introduces a fresh approach to Zhang's essays through analogy to the mnemonic genre of nostalgia, which Professor Kafalas examines in both Chinese and Western contexts. Nostalgia becomes the pattern by which these seemingly trivial essays assert a powerful sense of origin, presence, and place through minutely known objects, aesthetically overwhelming experiences and small social gestures.
In Limpid Dream is a compelling and stimulating literary history elucidating Zhang's nostalgic fragmentation of place and time. Zhang's introspective nostalgia strikes us as rather modern while Kafalas' insightful analysis iterates the legacies of Zhang's small prose in later Chinese writing and reflects on our own understanding of our non-narrative existence.
Nainai has lived in Shanghai for many years, and the time has come to find a wife for her adopted grandson. But when the bride she has chosen arrives from the countryside, it soon becomes clear that the orphaned girl has ideas of her own. Her name is Fu Ping, and the more she explores the residential lanes and courtyards behind Shanghai's busy shopping streets, the less she wants to return to the country as a dutiful wife. As Fu Ping wavers over her future, she learns the city through the stories of the nannies, handymen, and garbage collectors whose labor is bringing life and bustle back to postwar Shanghai.
Fu Ping is a keenly observed portrait of the lives of lower-class women in Shanghai in the early years of the People's Republic of China. Wang Anyi, one of contemporary China's most acclaimed authors, explores the daily lives of migrants from rural areas and other people on the margins of urban life. In shifting perspectives rich in detail and psychological insight, she sketches their aspirations, their fears, and the subtle ties that bind them together. In Howard Goldblatt's masterful translation, Fu Ping reveals Wang Anyi's precise renderings of history, class, and the human heart.
Amid the turmoil of the Ming-Qing dynastic transition in seventeenth-century China, some intellectuals sought refuge in romantic memories from what they perceived as cataclysmic events. This volume presents two memoirs by famous men of letters, Reminiscences of the Plum Shadows Convent by Mao Xiang (1611-93) and Miscellaneous Records of Plank Bridge by Yu Huai (1616-96), that recall times spent with courtesans. They evoke the courtesan world in the final decades of the Ming dynasty and the aftermath of its collapse.
Mao Xiang chronicles his relationship with the courtesan Dong Bai, who became his concubine two years before the Ming dynasty fell. His mournful remembrance of their life together, written shortly after her early death, includes harrowing descriptions of their wartime sufferings as well as idyllic depictions of romantic bliss. Yu Huai offers a group portrait of Nanjing courtesans, mixing personal memories with reported anecdotes. Writing fifty years after the fall of the Ming, he expresses a deep nostalgia for courtesan culture that bears the toll of individual loss and national calamity. Together, they shed light on the sensibilities of late Ming intellectuals: their recollections of refined pleasures and ruminations on the vagaries of memory coexist with political engagement and a belief in bearing witness. With an introduction and extensive annotations, Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge is a valuable source for the literature of remembrance, the representation of women, and the social role of intellectuals during a tumultuous period in Chinese history.
Lu Xun (1881-1936) is widely considered the greatest writer of twentieth-century China. Although primarily known for his two slim volumes of short fiction, he was a prolific and inventive essayist. Jottings under Lamplight showcases Lu Xun's versatility as a master of prose forms and his brilliance as a cultural critic with translations of sixty-two of his essays, twenty of which are translated here for the first time.
While a medical student in Tokyo, Lu Xun viewed a photographic slide that purportedly inspired his literary calling: it showed the decapitation of a Chinese man by a Japanese soldier, as Chinese bystanders watched apathetically. He felt that what his countrymen needed was a cure not for their physical ailments but for their souls. Autobiographical accounts describing this and other formative life experiences are included in Jottings, along with a wide variety of cultural commentaries, from letters, speeches, and memorials to parodies and treatises. Lu Xun was remarkably well versed in Chinese tradition and playfully manipulated its ancient forms. But he also turned away from historical convention, experimenting with new literary techniques and excoriating the slave mentality of a population paralyzed by Confucian hierarchies. Tinged at times with notes of despair, yet also with pathos, humor, and an unparalleled caustic wit, Lu Xun's essays chronicle the tumultuous transformations of his own life and times, providing penetrating insights into Chinese culture and society.
In this Ming-era novel, historical narrative, raucous humor, and the supernatural are interwoven to tell the tale of an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Song dynasty. A poor young girl meets an old woman who gives her a magic book that allows her to create rice and money. Her father, terrified that his daughter's demonic nature might be discovered, marries her off. Forced to flee, she and others with supernatural abilities find themselves in the midst of a grotesque version of a historical uprising, in which facts are intermingled with slapstick humor and wild fictions.
Attributed to the writer Luo Guanzhong, Quelling the Demons' Revolt is centered on the events of the rebellion led by Wang Ze in 1047-48. But it is a distorted, humorous version, in which Wang Ze's lieutenants show up as a comical peddler and a mysterious Daoist priest and a celebrated warrior appears despite having died many years earlier. Rather than fantastic adventures and supernatural marvels, the author points to human vanities and fixations as well as social injustice, warning of the vulnerability of any pursuit of order in a world plagued by demonic forces as well as mundane corruption. Although the story takes place long before the era in which it was written, ultimately Quelling the Demons' Revolt is the story of the Ming dynasty in Song masquerade, presciently warning of the dynasty's downfall. The novel is divided into chapters, but in many ways it is an arrangement of self-contained stories that draw on vernacular storytelling. This translation offers English-speaking readers a spirited example of social critique combined with caustic humor from the era of Luo Guanzhong.
In this two-part historical novel, the two martial arts masters are the teachers featured in the 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (based on Chinese author Wang Dulu's books). This book offers two interconnected stories about star-crossed lovers in a 19th-century world of Chinese martial arts, intrigue, and cultural constraints. In the first one, Chiang Shiao-ho is determined to kill his father's murderers and the abuser when he was an orphan. Chang is in agony between the duty of revenge and his love for the patriarch's granddaughter Bo Ah-ran. In Yu's (Chinese Mosaic. New Edition 2021) second tale, Lee Mo-bai (Chiang Shiao-ho's nephew) is a pampered heir of a landowner and an expert in the literary and martial arts. He is torn between his love of a living widow Yu Ceo-lian and an artistic prostitute. These two tragic love stories reflect the Chinese people's wishes to eradicate two cruel traditions: an eye for eye vengeance and a living widow. The characters in these stores are rich in texture and shaped by both thoughtful moral dilemmas and hyper-dynamic action. The two moving tales are skillfully propelled by acts of betrayal, honor, and duty.
Shang Qin (1930-2010) is widely considered one of the most influential and original modern Chinese poets. His critical acclaim was earned not only as a modern master of the prose poem but also as one of Taiwan's leading surrealist poets.
Taiwan in the 1950s saw the beginnings of a broad, eclectic search for new poetic models and varieties of modernism. This gained momentum and progressed through the 1960s, growing into a modernist movement. During this boom period for poetry, some of the leading Chinese poets of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond emerged: Lo Fu, Ya Hsien, and Yang Mu, to name just a few. Shang Qin, also one of the giants of the movement, came to prominence during this period; his first collection of poetry Dream or Dawn, published in 1969, has been hailed as a landmark of Chinese surrealism. The poet Ya Hsien dedicated his poem For a Surrealist to Shang Qin, and the label stuck. Shang Qin always found the surrealist label too restrictive and once commented wryly: I am not a surrealist; I am a super-realist or an uber-super-realist. One of the hallmarks of his work was his preference for the prose poem, and his impact on the composition of modern Chinese prose poem is unquestionable. However, Shang Qin has noted: I use prose poetry to create; I do not create prose poetry. The focus is the poem; it has nothing to do with prose. Therefore, while critics and academics are inclined to categorize, Shang Qin has always resisted this, adamant about his creative independence.
Shang Qin published five collections of poetry: Dream or Dawn (1969), Dream or Dawn and Others (1988), Thinking with My Feet (1988), The Millennium Collection (2000), and Complete Poems (2009). The present volume, The All-Seeing Eye, is a complete translation of his 2000 volume, which includes poems from his first three collections as well a substantial selection of previously unpublished verse. This book is the largest selection of his poetry available in English.
The collection is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and general readers interested in Taiwan literature, modern Chinese literature, modernism, surrealism, comparative literature, and world literature.
This book is part of the Cambria Literature from Taiwan Series, in collaboration with the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and National Taiwan Normal University.