Author: Ma Jian Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 9780374110178 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 604
Book Description
At once a powerful allegory of a rising China, racked by contradictions, and a seminal examination of the Tiananmen Square protests, "Beijing Coma" is a novel spiked with dark wit, poetic beauty, and a deep rage.
Author: Ma Jian Publisher: Catapult ISBN: 1640092412 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
Blending fact and fiction, this darkly comic fable “may be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party’s moral failings” (Mike Ives, The New York Times). Called “Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!" by Margaret Atwood on Twitter, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode's nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future. Exposing the damage inflicted on a nation's soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth, China Dream is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state–imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.
Author: Ma Jian Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101605847 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 367
Book Description
From one of world literature’s most courageous voices, a novel about the human cost of China’s one-child policy through the lens of one rural family on the run from its reach Far away from the Chinese economic miracle, from the bright lights of Beijing and Shanghai, is a vast rural hinterland, where life goes on much as it has for generations, with one extraordinary difference: “normal” parents are permitted by the state to have only a single child. The Dark Road is the story of one such “normal” family—Meili, a young peasant woman; her husband, Kongzi, a village schoolteacher; and their daughter, Nannan. Kongzi is, according to family myth, a direct lineal descendant of Confucius, and he is haunted by the imperative to carry on the family name by having a son. And so Meili becomes pregnant again without state permission, and when local family planning officials launch a new wave of crackdowns, the family makes the radical decision to leave its village and set out on a small, rickety houseboat down the Yangtze River. Theirs is a dark road, and tragedy awaits them, and horror, but also the fierce beauty born of courageous resistance to injustice and inhumanity. The Dark Road is a haunting and indelible portrait of the tragedies befalling women and families at the hands of China’s one-child policy and of the human spirit’s capacity to endure even the most brutal cruelty. While Ma Jian wrote The Dark Road, he traveled through the rural backwaters of southwestern China to see how the state enforced the one-child policy far from the outside world’s prying eyes. He met local women who had been seized from their homes and forced to undergo abortions or sterilization in the policy’s name; and on the Yangtze River, he lived among fugitive couples who had gone on the run so they could have more children, that most fundamental of human rights. Like all of Ma Jian’s novels, The Dark Road is also a celebration of the life force, of the often comically stubborn resilience of man’s most basic instincts.
Author: Ma Jian Publisher: Anchor ISBN: 0307427412 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 403
Book Description
In 1983, at the age of thirty, dissident artist Ma Jian finds himself divorced by his wife, separated from his daughter, betrayed by his girlfriend, facing arrest for “Spiritual Pollution,” and severely disillusioned with the confines of life in Beijing. So with little more than a change of clothes and two bars of soap, Ma takes off to immerse himself in the remotest parts of China. His journey would last three years and take him through smog-choked cities and mountain villages, from scenes of barbarity to havens of tranquility. Remarkably written and subtly moving, the result is an insight into the teeming contradictions of China that only a man who was both insider and outsider in his own country could have written.
Author: Ha Jin Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307428354 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
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.
Author: Ian Johnson Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307430251 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
In Wild Grass, Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist Ian Johnson tells the stories of three ordinary Chinese citizens moved to extraordinary acts of courage: a peasant legal clerk who filed a class-action suit on behalf of overtaxed farmers, a young architect who defended the rights of dispossessed homeowners, and a bereaved woman who tried to find out why her elderly mother had been beaten to death in police custody. Representing the first cracks in the otherwise seamless façade of Communist Party control, these small acts of resistance demonstrate the unconquerable power of the human conscience and prophesy an increasingly open political future for China.
Author: Belinda Kong Publisher: Temple University Press ISBN: 1439907595 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
An exciting analysis of the myriad literary effects of Tiananmen, Belinda Kong's Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square is the first full-length study of fictions related to the 1989 movement and massacre. More than any other episode in recent world history, Tiananmen has brought a distinctly politicized Chinese literary diaspora into stark relief. Kong redefines Tiananmen's meaning from an event that ended in local political failure to one that succeeded in producing a vital dimension of contemporary transnational writing today. She spotlights key writers-Gao Xingjian, Ha Jin, Annie Wang, and Ma Jian-who have written and published about the massacre from abroad. Their outsider/distanced perspectives inform their work, and reveal how diaspora writers continually reimagine Tiananmen's relevance to the post-1989 world at large. Compelling us to think about how Chinese culture, identity, and politics are being defined in the diaspora, Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square candidly addresses issues of political exile, historical trauma, global capital, and state biopower.
Author: John Pomfret Publisher: Henry Holt and Company ISBN: 1429944129 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 705
Book Description
A remarkable history of the two-centuries-old relationship between the United States and China, from the Revolutionary War to the present day From the clipper ships that ventured to Canton hauling cargos of American ginseng to swap Chinese tea, to the US warships facing off against China's growing navy in the South China Sea, from the Yankee missionaries who brought Christianity and education to China, to the Chinese who built the American West, the United States and China have always been dramatically intertwined. For more than two centuries, American and Chinese statesmen, merchants, missionaries, and adventurers, men and women, have profoundly influenced the fate of these nations. While we tend to think of America's ties with China as starting in 1972 with the visit of President Richard Nixon to China, the patterns—rapturous enchantment followed by angry disillusionment—were set in motion hundreds of years earlier. Drawing on personal letters, diaries, memoirs, government documents, and contemporary news reports, John Pomfret reconstructs the surprising, tragic, and marvelous ways Americans and Chinese have engaged with one another through the centuries. A fascinating and thrilling account, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom is also an indispensable book for understanding the most important—and often the most perplexing—relationship between any two countries in the world.
Author: Premier Zhao Ziyang Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1847377149 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 499
Book Description
Prisoner of the Stateis the story of the man who brought liberal change to China and who, at the height of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, tried to stop the massacre and was dethroned for his efforts. When China's army moved in, killing hundreds of students and other demonstrators, Zhao was placed under house arrest at his home in Beijing. The Premier spent the last 16 years of his life, up until his death in 2005, in seclusion. China scholars often lamented that Zhao never had his final say. As it turns out, Zhao did produce a memoir, in complete secrecy. He methodically recorded his thoughts and recollections on what had happened behind the scenes during many of modern China's most critical moments. The tapes he produced were smuggled out of the country and form the basis for Prisoner of the State. Although Zhao now speaks from beyond the grave, his voice has the moral power to make China sit up and listen.
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Author: Ma Jian
Author: Ma Jian
Author: Ma Jian
Author: Ma Jian
Author: Ha Jin
Author: Louisa Lim
Author: Ian Johnson
Author: Belinda Kong
Author: John Pomfret
Author: Premier Zhao Ziyang