Destination Chungking tells the love story of a young Chinese couple during the turmoil of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Separated and reunited during an epic retreat across China to the wartime capital of Chungking (Chongqing) far up the Yangtze River, the couple will find their love and patriotism tested.

Presents critical perspectives on the works of Asian-American writers, including Gish Jen, Cheng-rae Lee, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

With the beautiful, powerful, and sexy Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the center of one of the great dramas of the twentieth century, this is the story of the founding of modern China, starting with a revolution that swept away more than 2,000 years of monarchy, followed by World War II, and ending in the eventual loss to the Communists and exile in Taiwan. An epic historical tapestry, this wonderfully wrought narrative brings to life what Americans should know about China -- the superpower we are inextricably linked with -- the way its people think and their code of behavior, both vastly different from our own. The story revolves around this fascinating woman and her family: her father, a peasant who raised himself into Shanghai society and sent his daughters to college in America in a day when Chinese women were kept purposefully uneducated; her mother, an unlikely Methodist from the Mandarin class; her husband, a military leader and dogmatic warlord; her sisters, one married to Sun Yat-sen, the George Washington of China, the other to a seventy-fifth lineal descendant of Confucius; and her older brother, a financial genius. This was the Soong family, which, along with their partners in marriage, was largely responsible for dragging China into the twentieth century. Brilliantly narrated, this fierce and bloody drama also includes U.S. Army General Joseph Stilwell; Claire Chennault, head of the Flying Tigers; Communist leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai; murderous warlords; journalists Henry Luce, Theodore White, and Edgar Snow; and the unfortunate State Department officials who would be purged for predicting (correctly) the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. As the representative of an Eastern ally in the West, Madame Chiang was befriended -- before being rejected -- by the Roosevelts, stayed in the White House for long periods during World War II, and charmed the U.S. Congress into giving China billions of dollars. Although she was dubbed the Dragon Lady in some quarters, she was an icon to her people and is certainly one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century.

In Diasporic Representations, author Pin-chia Feng examines the stratification of various diasporic subjectivities through close reading fiction by Chinese American women writers of different social and class backgrounds. Deploying a strategy of "attentive reading", Feng engages the intersecting issues of historicity, spatiality, and bodily imagination from diasporic and feminist perspectives to illuminate the dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in Chinese American novels in this transnational age. The authors studied include Diana Chang, Edith Eaton, Yan Geling, Nieh Hualing, Gish Jen, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Aimee Liu, Fae Myenne Ng, Sigrid Nunez, Han Suyin, and Amy Tan.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population. Intimate Communities argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites’ conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country. These bonds transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language.

The 1930s were perhaps the seminal decade in twentieth-century history, a dark time of global depression that displaced millions, paralyzed the liberal democracies, gave rise to totalitarian regimes, and, ultimately, led to the Second World War. In this sweeping history, Piers Brendon brings the tragic, dismal days of the 1930s to life. From Stalinist pogroms to New Deal programs, Brendon re-creates the full scope of a slow international descent towards war. Offering perfect sketches of the players, riveting descriptions of major events and crises, and telling details from everyday life, he offers both a grand, rousing narrative and an intimate portrait of an era that make sense out of the fascinating, complicated, and profoundly influential years of the 1930s.

De auteur concentreert zich op leven en werk van Amerikaanse schrijfsters van Chinese afkomst. Ze heeft daarbij vooral aandacht voor de grensoverschrijdingen tussen China en de Verenigde Staten, en dit zowel in de biografieën als in het literaire werk van deze schrijfsters. Deze studie vult een belangrijke lacune aan in de receptie van de Aziatisch-Amerikaanse literatuur.

From the travel writing of the eccentric plant collector and Reginald Farrer, to Emily Hahn’s insider depictions of bohemian life in semi-colonial Shanghai, to Ezra Pound’s mediated ‘journeys’ to Southwest China via the explorer Joseph Rock – Anglo-American representations of China during the first half of the twentieth century were often unconventional in terms of style, form, and content. By examining a range of texts that were written in the flux of travel – including poems, novels, autobiographies – this study argues that the tumultuous social and political context of China’s Republican Period (1912-49) was a key setting for conceptualizing cultural modernity in global and transnational terms. In contrast with accounts that examine China’s influence on Western modernism through language, translation, and discourse, the book recovers a materialist engagement with landscapes, objects, and things as transcribed through travel, ethnographic encounter, and embodied experience. The book is organized by three themes which suggest formal strategies through which notions cultural modernity were explored or contested: borderlands, cosmopolitan performances, and mobile poetics. As it draws from archival sources in order to develop these themes, this study offers a place-based historical perspective on China’s changing status in Western literary cultures.

In 1933, Shih-I Hsiung (1902–1991), a student from China, met with Allardyce Nicoll, a Shakespearean scholar at the University of London, to discuss his PhD study in English drama. After learning about Hsiung’s interest and background, Nicoll suggested that he should consider studying Chinese drama for his dissertation and writing a play of a Chinese subject. Hsiung took the advice to heart and set out to write Lady Precious Stream, a play based on a classical Beijing opera. In six weeks, the writing was completed; six months later, the manuscript was accepted for publication by Methuen; and not long after, Little Theater in London agreed to produce the play, which ran for 900 successive shows. The phenomenal success turned Hsiung into stardom all at once: he became the first Chinese to write and direct a West End play in England; in 1936, the play had its Broadway premiere and subsequent performances in Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and other U.S. cities; and it has been produced and staged in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia ever since. Following the success of Lady Precious Stream, Hsiung translated into English the Chinese classic The Romance of the Western Chamber; in addition, he wrote a number of plays, novels, and essays, in both English and Chinese, as well as the biography The Life of Chiang Kai-shek.Shih-I Hsiung: A Glorious Showman unfolds the transnational and transcultural life experience of an extraordinary showman: a literary master, a theater man, and a social actor bold and impassioned on socio-cultural stages. Hsiung introduced English and American literature to readers in China through his translation works in the 1920s and early 1930s. After his arrival in England, he began writing in English for audiences not familiar with the Chinese culture. His works were known for their originality, humor, and a deep sense of cultural and historical engagement. Later in his life when he was residing in Hong Kong, he was devoted to education and was also active in Chinese literary and theater circles.

Eating Bitter, a Chinese American Saga is a richly textured biography charting the long lives of Paul and Sonia Ho. It is about survival of the Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, the Communist Revolution and the prejudices the family encountered as immigrants to the United States. It is about memory - and conflicting memories. Eating Bitter is, above all, an American success story. It was Paul and Sonia’s eldest son, David, whose groundbreaking work on AIDS made him Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 1996 and, a few years later, won him the Presidential Citizens Medal.