Comments on: Horrendous Chinese History

By: Cottontimer

Cottontimer — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 18:48:25 +0000

Hi Andrea,

How nice to hear from you again! Please stay in touch.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:21:09 +0000

Hi Hsien

There’s a really interesting thread amongst Chinese mothers on http://www.mumsnet.com – you’ll pick up alot of info and experiences both here and abroad on there.

Kindest Regards

Andrea

(P.S. was sorry to see you go from the Play Library but enjoying the DNA site when I have the chance.

By: Cottontimer

Cottontimer — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:47:57 +0000

Thanks for the recommendations! I read The Good Earth years ago but haven’t heard of Mao’s Last Dancer. I don’t know how I’ll feel if I ever live in China. It would certainly be an eye-opening experience.

By: Cottontimer

Cottontimer — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:46:51 +0000

It’s hard to know exactly what the people are like in countries like China when they have one face for foreigners and one face for locals. A bit frightening….

By: Cottontimer

Cottontimer — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:45:52 +0000

Rosie, You have more experience than I do when it comes to China! Wild Swans was an incredible read. I think I finished it in a week which isn’t bad for 500 pages!

By: Tracy

Tracy — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 04:51:15 +0000

i like the Good Earth and another book you might want to read is Mao’s Last Dancer by Li CunXin – it gave an insight to what it was like during communism. i am Chinese by heritage but Malaysian and reading these books gave me an insight. i am now living in China for short periods and have discovered that i am a world apart although i am Chinese

By: Robyn

Robyn — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 10:56:13 +0000

Hsien, I had the privilege of working six weeks in China. I grew to love the people there with whom I had the privilege of working. Wild Swans gives insights into China that I had no idea of. I read it when I returned and because I did that, I grew to understand the people even more. The newspapers do not give us a true picture of the people in China. We only hear about leaders.

By: Rosie

Rosie — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 03:47:53 +0000

I was deeply moved by Wild Swans when I read it; it was the only Chinese history I knew for an extremely long time, and not until I did a course on Chinese art in the 20th century did I get any proper grip on what happened. This is why I studied art history, we get to cover pretty much the whole of Chinese history and culture at least briefly!
(it’s not likely that you’ll have any time to read it, but the book which really “shook me up” was Julia Andrew’s “Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China”)
However, Jung Chang’s credibility was harmed so badly by her MAO biography that I can’t really take her words so seriously as I did at the time. MAO is a jumble of tales passed on “based on the author’s memory of a conversation she had with a person who wishes to remain anonymous” — not academic at all, and yet not written in the “popular science” style which makes reading agreable to the non-academic.

An example of the “easy-reading” which I read recently was The Kitchen God’s Wife, by Amy Tan. It was slow going at first as I didn’t really identify with the American/Chinese ?? crisis, but it became far more interesting once it concentrated on the mother’s secret past. I learnt a lot about the way the war with the Japanese had unfolded, and also about the traditional silence and submissiveness of Chinese women, which is something I think about a lot. If I were to go back to university, I’d be extremely keen to research the cultural attitudes of women here in Taiwan… they really are very mysterious.

Ramble ramble… by now you know that this is what you can expect from me when you mention China!