If one ever forgets what poetry is for, this newly-released collection is a reminder of its ability to renew, sooth and provoke. Mirror is a translation of a lengthy posthumous selection of Chinese poet Zhang Zao’s lifelong opus.
China
Qing Yuan works in a morgue, cleaning bodies. He grew up in a cultured family before 1949, studying art and literature in university. Qing Yuan’s father owned a jewelry shop and got into trouble with the new government after he tried to hide a small amount of gold during the early days of nationalization. Qing Yuan was punished for his father’s capitalist ways and when Ruyan Meng’s novel opens in 1966, he’s been the morgue keeper of the title for sixteen years.
From a general historical perspective, the current confrontation between mainland China and Taiwan is not difficult to explain. By the end of the 19th century, Qing Dynasty was teetering on the brink of collapse. Territories were carved out and handed over to foreign colonizers after failed battles. Taiwan was ceded to the Empire of Japan in 1895.
A Cure for Chaos is one of the recent titles in Princeton University Press’s book series “Illustrated Library of Chinese Classics,” aimed at showcasing the Chinese classics in Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and more, in graphic form. With illustrations by the renowned illustrator CC Tsai, translation and introductory commentaries by philosophy professor Brian Bruya of Eastern Michigan University, the books in this series visualize the ideas that characterize Chinese philosophy.
While Taiwan continues to be in the news due to its geopolitical ambiguities, a lesser-known aspect of its short recorded history is the establishment of a Dutch colony in its southern part in the 17th century. A Tale of Three Tribes in Dutch Formosa describes this Dutch settlement and its interactions with local indigenous people and its heroic but futile resistance against invading Chinese loyalist warlord Koxinga.
What happens if you took one of the classic characters of Chinese literary fiction and dropped him into early 20th-century China? That’s the premise of Wu Jianren’s novel, New Story of the Stone, written in 1905, which takes Jia Baoyu, from the classic Dream of the Red Chamber, and takes him first to Qing China and the Boxer Rebellion, and then to the fantastical “Realm of Civilization”, a world that, in Wu’s eyes, reflected what he thought would happen if people embraced Chinese beliefs.
Although no longer as true as it was, East Asian trade in the early-modern period is often presented from the perspective of one more Western nation or another: the Spain’s Manila Galleon trade, the Portuguese spice trade and unique base in Macau, the Dutch East India Company, and latterly, the British via Canton and Hong Kong.
Writers have long found it useful to approach the tumult of modern China through the lives of those leaders born around or shortly after the turn of the twentieth century: men whose careers stretched across the subsequent decades of revolution, war, political turmoil and economic transformation. In the last twelve months we have already had two heavyweight biographies of such Chinese leaders—Chen Jian on Zhou Enlai, Robert Suettinger on Hu Yaobang—and now Joseph Torigian has written a similarly substantial account of the life of Xi Zhongxun. Though he never held the highest office, Xi’s life provides a revealing lens through which to view the history of both party and country, as well as the remarkable psychology of persecution and allegiance that marks the stories of the generation of leaders who suffered through the worst excesses of the Mao era.
Keru Cai’s Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism examines the ways in which early 20th-century Chinese writers drew upon Russian works about the socially downtrodden to describe poverty, in a bid to enrich Chinese culture by creating a syncretic new realism. Modern Chinese realist writers turned to the topic of material poverty—peasants suffering from famine, exploited urban laborers, homeless orphans—to convey their sense of textual poverty and national backwardness.
King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, starts with Lear dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Goneril and Regan win the kingdom through flattery, Cordelia’s honesty is rewarded with exile.
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