No comments about Chinese Portraits (Images Across the Ages).

No comments about Yuan Mei, Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet.

1 comments about Chinese Lives.

1. These two Beijing based journalists (from the center of the PRChinese propaganda universe), a man and woman team, take on an ambitious project to provide a glimpse of street thoughts in the mid 80s, for the 35th anniversary of the PRC. They gathered info from these interviews and wrote them up in Chinese. The interviewers did not use tape recorders, which I think would intimidate interviewees, but then the authenticity of the talks would depend entirely on the skill of the journalists. It appears that the authors cherry picked about a fourth of the interviews from people who already had been in the news before as model Chinese. This material was originally published as a column in NYC-based "China Daily News" for expats and OEChinese. Then it was republished as a compendium in Shanghai-based literary magazines in 1985 and a book in 1986 all in Chinese.

   An editorial staff translated 64 of the 100+ articles from Chinese into Shanghai (UK) English. They edited them into appropriate idiomatic English that would be typical of the speaker. So the vignettes typically had lots of street slang from teenagers, the indigent and peasants, a more formal and cautious tone from middle aged adults, and more reverent speech from the retired. So this work simulated talking about a slice of life from the Chinese public and are categorized into 17 general topics about life. There is no index.

   Since many interviews were from the available populace who are willing to talk, and many weren't, this book is one of the very few where Americans can read about a slice of life of peasants (small time farmers), the unemployed, the indigent, and the handicapped, something that you will not get at all in tourist books. It also includes a few vignettes on the new "petty capitalism with Chinese characteristics," introduced by Deng's Reform and Opening policy started almost a decade earlier in 1978. Quite a few vignettes captured the essence in surviving the social and economic turmoil of the 50s and 60s of Mao's early socialist experiments. I read this book at a local public library while researching the attitudes of modern China after Deng Xiaoping's death of 1997.

   Remember, these thoughts are but a slice in time; because most interviews are extemporaneous, ie not planned out or written down. So there are interviews that are obviously braggarts, social climbers, talk about family conflicts and airing dirty laundry, and about a third who have something profound to say as they have tightly sealed their lips heretofore to avoid persecution. Interviews averaged about 4 ½ pages; the shortest about a page and the longest about 11 pages (Prison p229). Many were done in the Beijing / Nanjing metro area; the next common area was in Hebei and Shandong provinces just south of Beijing and Tianjin. Some interviews were done in Szechwan, Shanghai, Harbin, Guangzhou, and the minority regions of SW China. There is a two-page map of China with many specific interview locations marked, along with provinces, rivers, large cities, and certain mountainous areas. There are no city or county maps although many interviews reference these areas.

   One thing that rang out loud and clear is that the Communist regime did an exhaustive job of methodically and systematically identifying and ridding of the Black 5s (p180); landowners, capitalists, rightists, counter-revolutionaries, and bad elements, those who would try to foment more political unrest. In tandem, they installed a socialist system with people that pledged undying allegiance, mainly the young and the malleable. They used the military at first, then city police, then the Red Guard, and street committees to effectively subjugate the populace down to the village level. Every person had a government dossier file that identified potential defectability, similar to what is in the Diary of Anne Frank and other books on persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany. This left an indelible mark on families as they saw many people executed or shipped off to forced labor or re-education camps. Those that were borderline were put in socialist internment labor camps in poor, desolate areas and have them "educate" the indigenous peasant, much like our Vista program.

   The old system of social class is very evident in the interviews as each vignette is prefaced with age, occupation, position in the family, and occupation of their parents and grandparents. Family names and township / village were left out upon request for anonymity. The topics included are: making a living, recent social history, climbing the social ladder, marriage and family, petty capitalism, peasant life, non-traditional workers, working in SOEs, working in the Party and RedGuard, individualists, crime, work as soldiers and in Defense, social history, life with handicaps, traveling salespeople, show business, and youth coping with success, failure, and apathy. Each topic will have 3-5 vignettes on the topic. Even today, it appears that the local commune and street committees that were setup so long ago need to give permission for any moving, business, and work requests. This persistent bureaucracy is so endemic that guanxi, bribery, and groveling to local politicos is necessary to improve one's status. Probably similar to our local neighborhood associations and city councils.

   The more memorable vignettes were about a building construction entrepreneur (p87-94), pro-am bridge builder (p99-110), prison life for incest and murder by a juvenile (pg 229-40), and a privileged elder of avionics technology & foreign JV pre-WWII (p253-60).

   This book could be compared to the popular radio and TV talk shows in the US, from national syndications to fluffy local ones. A talk with those people willing to be put on hold for a long time and then to be famous by speaking their mind in their brief slice in time. So take this book within the validity and context of Talk shows. I'd also compare the authors' work as relevant and comprehensive as Peter Hessler's River Town. One thing they didn't cover is suicide.

2 comments about Faces in the Crowd: A Journey in Hope.

1. The book tells stories of people in Asia which Mr. Bale (the author) knows some times ago. He decided to see what happened to them after all these years. As I took a journey along with Mr. Bale both in his book and personally when he was writing it (I have helped him as an interpreter while he was in Thailand writing one chapter of this book), I found it to be a wonderful voyage. The stories are inspiring and full of hope as the name of the book itself implied.



2. I visited the Future Hope organisation in Calcutta India back in 1997. Tim Grandage is fantastic. He is really doing a marvellous job rehabilitating street children of Calcutta. Chris Bale knows how to capture the children then and now very well. Read the whole book in one go. Simply fabulous!

No comments about Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story (in Chinese) (Kelindun fu ren zhuan).

No comments about A Generation of Movie Star Ruan Lin-Yu (In Chinese).

No comments about Reginald Johnston Chinese Mandarin: Chinese Mandarin (Scot¬s Lives).

No comments about English in Tibet, Tibet in English: Self-Presentation in Tibet and the Diaspora.

1 comments about A Chinese Pioneer Family : The Lins of Wu-Feng, Taiwan, 1729-1895.

1. This is a first-choice, must-read book on Taiwan history and culture. It covers most of Taiwan's frontier period as well as colonial era. If you really want to get a feel of what life was like in early Taiwan, this is the book for you. Very accurate and well-written, it reads like a novel. Definitely required reading, I highly recommend it for not just scholarly work, but also for purely pleasure reading.

No comments about Fifth Chinese daughter. [Autobiography] With illus. by Kathryn Uhl.