[PDF] Daughters Of The Flower Fragrant Garden Two Sisters Separated By Chinas Civil War eBook

Author : Zhuqing Li
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 11,19 MB
Release : 2022-06-21
Category : History
ISBN : 0393541789

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A BookBrowse Best Nonfiction for Book Clubs in 2024 “Exceptional…[A] gripping narrative of one family divided by the ‘bamboo curtain.’” —Deirdre Mask, New York Times Book Review Sisters separated by war forge new identities as they are forced to choose between family, nation, and their own independence. Jun and Hong were scions of a once great southern Chinese family. Each other’s best friend, they grew up in the 1930s during the final days of Old China before the tumult of the twentieth century brought political revolution, violence, and a fractured national identity. By a quirk of timing, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, Jun ended up on an island under Nationalist control, and then settled in Taiwan, married a Nationalist general, and lived among fellow exiles at odds with everything the new Communist regime stood for on the mainland. Hong found herself an ocean away on the mainland, forced to publicly disavow both her own family background and her sister’s decision to abandon the party. A doctor by training, to overcome the suspicion created by her family circumstances, Hong endured two waves of “re-education” and internal exile, forced to work in some of the most desperately poor, remote areas of the country. Ambitious, determined, and resourceful, both women faced morally fraught decisions as they forged careers and families in the midst of political and social upheaval. Jun established one of U.S.-allied Taiwan’s most important trading companies. Hong became one of the most celebrated doctors in China, appearing on national media and honored for her dedication to medicine. Niece to both sisters, linguist and East Asian scholar Zhuqing Li tells her aunts’ story for the first time, honoring her family’s history with sympathy and grace. Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden is a window into the lives of women in twentieth-century China, a time of traumatic change and unparalleled resilience. In this riveting and deeply personal account, Li confronts the bitter political rivals of mainland China and Taiwan with elegance and unique insight, while celebrating her aunts’ remarkable legacies.

Author : Everest Media,
Publisher : Everest Media LLC
Page : 44 pages
File Size : 31,92 MB
Release : 2022-07-23T22:59:00Z
Category : History
ISBN :

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 My grandfather, Chen Shouchun, was the first member of the Chen family to break away from a long tradition of scholar-officials. He went to the Baoding Military Academy, where he took a new name: Chen Daodi, meaning Chen Who Smashes the Enemy. He briefly served in the Nationalist Army, and then returned home to marry and have children. #2 The family was at the Confucian apex, and Grandfather’s mother, a commanding person with bound feet, was the strongest example for Jun and Hong, her granddaughters. Grandfather, who had been given little education, was a strong and well-respected man. #3 The family compound known as the Flower Fragrant Garden was where the extended Chen family lived. It was there that Jun and Hong were raised, surrounded by a large family, and exposed to the family’s values. #4 The Chen family, which originated in Luozhou, a small island in the fertile estuary at the mouth of the Min River, had moved upriver to Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province, by the time another ancestor, Chen Ruolin, won the clan’s second jinshi in 1787. They were all top degree holders in the bureaucratic system.

Author : Helen Zia
Publisher :
Page : 545 pages
File Size : 24,70 MB
Release : 2019
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 034552232X

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"The dramatic, real-life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China's 1949 Communist Revolution--a precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today. Shanghai has historically been China's jewel, its richest, most modern and westernized city. The bustling metropolis was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao's proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to fled in every direction. Seventy years later, the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have opened the story to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia, who interviewed hundreds of exiles about their journey through one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. From these moving accounts, Zia weaves the story of four young Shanghai residents who wrestled with the decision to abandon everything for an uncertain life as refugees in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the U.S. Young Benny, who as a teenager became the unwilling heir to his father's dark wartime legacy, must choose between escaping Hong Kong or navigating the intricacies of a newly Communist China. The resolute Annuo, forced to flee her home with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome young exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation in order to continue his studies in the U.S. while his family struggles at home. And Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America"--

Author : Scott Liell
Publisher : Running Press Adult
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 37,55 MB
Release : 2004-03-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :

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"Includes complete text of Thomas Paine's Common sense"--Cover.

Author : Jenny Smith
Publisher : Significant Publications
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 29,28 MB
Release : 2021-07-10
Category :
ISBN : 9781737086703

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Jenny Smith was a typical teenager-a gymnast and athlete who loved hair and makeup, played in a band, and was active in her church youth group. Then one bright summer morning, a spinal cord injury left her paralyzed from the chest down and dependent on others for her most basic needs. Privacy and independence seemed like things of the past. But Jenny refused to give up or give in to her disability, and over time she discovered that a wheelchair could take her places she'd never dared to imagine. She's traveled multiple times to Afghanistan and Mexico for wheelchair distributions and sports camps, and even rolled the New York City runway as a model during Fashion Week. Today, Jenny Smith is a spokesperson for independent and vibrant living with a disability. Her speeches, articles, and social media presence have touched thousands of lives.In Live the Impossible, Smith shares what it looks like to live with paralysis, from the everyday details most people never think about, to the countless people who have impacted her life along the way. With honesty and humor, faith and fortitude, Jenny shows us how we can all live the impossible, even when life doesn't go as planned.

Author : Tobie Meyer-Fong
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 15,17 MB
Release : 2013-03-27
Category : History
ISBN : 0804785597

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The Taiping Rebellion was one of the costliest civil wars in human history. Many millions of people lost their lives. Yet while the Rebellion has been intensely studied by scholars in China and elsewhere, we still know little of how individuals coped with these cataclysmic events. Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, What Remains explores the issues that preoccupied Chinese and Western survivors. Individuals, families, and communities grappled with fundamental questions of loyalty and loss as they struggled to rebuild shattered cities, bury the dead, and make sense of the horrors that they had witnessed. Driven by compelling accounts of raw emotion and deep injury, What Remains opens a window to a world described by survivors themselves. This book transforms our understanding of China's 19th century and recontextualizes suffering and loss in China during the 20th century.

Author : Hilary Spurling
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 33,69 MB
Release : 2010-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1416540423

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One of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary Americans, Pearl Buck was the first person to make China accessible to the West. She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China’s future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China’s building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party. Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl’s life in China. "Asia was the real, the actual world," she said, "and my own country became the dreamworld." Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in The Good Earth. It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that The Good Earth would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either. Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people— "translating my parents to me," said Hong Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening.

Author : Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 141 pages
File Size : 21,53 MB
Release : 2011-03-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0062074954

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The New York Times bestseller, written by a former reporter for ABC News, that People magazine called “a transporting, enlightening book” tells the story of a fearless young entrepreneur who brought hope to the lives of dozens of women in war-torn Afghanistan Former ABC journalist Gayle Tzemach Lemmon tells the riveting true story of Kamila Sidiqi and other women of Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban’s fearful rise to power. In what Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, calls “one of the most inspiring books I have ever read,” Lemmon recounts with novelistic vividness the true story of a fearless young woman who not only reinvented herself as an entrepreneur to save her family but, in the face of ferocious opposition, brought hope to the lives of dozens of women in war-torn Kabul.

Author : Adeline Yen Mah
Publisher : Laurel Leaf
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 17,11 MB
Release : 2009-05-06
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN : 0307482804

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More than 800,000 copies in print! From the author of critically acclaimed and bestselling memoir Falling Leaves, this is a poignant and moving true account of her childhood, growing up as an unloved daughter in 1940s China. A Chinese proverb says, "Falling leaves return to their roots." In her own courageous voice, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph in the face of despair. Adeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother dies giving birth to her, and life does not get any easier when her father remarries. Adeline and her siblings are subjected to the disdain of her stepmother, while her stepbrother and stepsister are spoiled with gifts and attention. Although Adeline wins prizes at school, they are not enough to compensate for what she really yearns for -- the love and understanding of her family. Like the classic Cinderella story, this powerful memoir is a moving story of resilience and hope. Includes an Author's Note, a 6-page photo insert, a historical note, and the Chinese text of the original Chinese Cinderella. A PW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR AN ALA-YALSA BEST BOOK FOR YOUNG ADULTS “One of the most inspiring books I have ever read.” –The Guardian