This compelling book examines the mobility of domestic workers, at both material and symbolic levels, and of the formation and social mobility of the urban middle-class through its consumption of domestic service.

Maid in China is the first systematic, book-length investigation of internal rural migration in post-Mao China focused on the day-to-day production and consumption of popular media. Taking the rural maid in the urban home as its point of departure, the book weaves together three years of engaged ethnographic research in Beijing and Shanghai with critical analyses of a diverse array of popular media, and follows three lines of inquiry: media and cultural production, consumption practices, and everyday politics. It unravels some of the myriad ways in which the subaltern figure of the domestic worker comes to be inscribed with the cultural politics of boundaries that entrench a host of inequalities—between rich and poor, male and female, rural and urban. Wanning Sun explores a number of paradoxes that the domestic worker lives out on a daily basis: her ubiquitous invisibility, her enduring transience, and her status as an intimate stranger. Collectively, these paradoxes afford her a unique window onto the spaces and practices of the modern Chinese city. This intimate stranger’s epistemological status makes her an unauthorized yet authoritative witness of urban residents’ social lives, offering a revealing lens through which to examine both the formation of new social relations in post-reform urban China, and the new social uses of space—both domestic and public—engendered by these relations.

A young girl forced to work in a Queens sweatshop calls child services on her mother in this powerful debut memoir about labor and self-worth that traces a Chinese immigrant's journey to an American future. As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family's garment factory in Queens. At home, she is treated as a maid and suffers punishment for doing her homework at night. Her mother wants to teach her a lesson: she is Chinese, not American, and such is their tough path in their new country. But instead of acquiescing, Qu alerts the Office of Children and Family Services, an act with consequences that impact the rest of her life. Nearly twenty years later, estranged from her mother and working at a Manhattan start-up, Qu requests her OCFS report. When it arrives, key details are wrong. Faced with this false narrative, and on the brink of losing her job as the once-shiny start-up collapses, Qu looks once more at her life's truths, from abandonment to an abusive family to seeking dignity and meaning in work. Traveling from Wenzhou to Xi'an to New York, Made in China is a fierce memoir unafraid to ask thorny questions about trauma and survival in immigrant families, the meaning of work, and the costs of immigration.

"An ethnography with a twist, in that it portrays the domestic workers in their own terms, speaking for themselves through their experiences and reactions, including the strategies of resistance developed by the workers." China Journal"

Until now our understanding of marriage in China has been based primarily on observations made during the twentieth century. The research of ten eminent scholars presented here provides a new vision of marriage in Chinese history, exploring the complex interplay between marriage and the social, political, economic, and gender inequalities that have so characterized Chinese society.

‘Scattered with inspiring life-stories of courageous women.’ The Guardian In the early years of the People’s Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations. Yet those gains have been steadily eroded in China’s post-socialist era. Contrary to the image presented by China’s media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men. In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher exposes shocking levels of structural discrimination against women, and the broader damage this has caused to China’s economy, politics, and development.

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author. An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

A woman who spent more than six years in solitary confinement during Communist China's Cultural Revolution discusses her time in prison. Reissue. A New York Times Best Book of the Year.

A classic story of love and sacrifice Description Mei Chan, a beautiful damsel from a poor background in China, has the opportunity of a lifetime to travel abroad and work in New York City. Her first job as a maid lands her in the house of a wealthy family where she meets Jason Jones, the third child of the 11th-richest man in the world. Soon, Mei and Jason fall in love. But one evening, a romantic trip to Letch Park turns into a race to save Jason’s life. Whatever befalls Jason in the abandoned house in the park is mysterious, and the cure to his ailment is not scientific. Desperate to find a solution, Jason’s father is offering the highest reward ever to any woman who will risk her life to save his son. About Cataphrase: Think of Cataphrase as a movie script designed to look like a book. We use the word “movie” to describe a Cataphrase book because the genre focuses on writing movies alone. Like one Cataphrase reader said, “When a good novel loses all its unnecessary weight, it becomes a Cataphrase.” The concept of writing a book that gives a reader the experience of watching a movie is what gave birth to Cataphrase. Simplified, Cataphrase is a book that summarizes what happens in a movie without sacrificing the interesting parts. Cataphrase doesn’t use a table of contents or chapters; instead, the pages are Cataphrased into scenes. A Cataphrase book does not exceed 200 pages. The reason is because most book readers believe a book that is written to entertain people shouldn’t exceed 250 pages, as, with the schedule of most people today, it could take up to a month or more to finish reading it. And let's say you have ten favorite authors and you've bought all their new books, and each is 300 pages or more. Imagine how long it will take you to read all the books. I’m not saying it’s impossible to read ten 300-page books in a month, but let’s be realistic. Unless you are unemployed, how many people have the time to read ten books in a month? However, the truth is, if a book is interesting, regardless of the size, we can always find time to read it. Often, when we are on a bus, train, or plane or just waiting for an oil change, we read one or two pages of a newspaper or that big novel we’ve been carrying about for a month. Have you ever heard someone say, “Anytime I need to fall asleep, I’ll pick up a Bible and start reading”? A book shouldn’t be a sleeping pill. This is why Cataphrase is designed to entertain readers and not help them fall asleep. The logic of Cataphrase is similar to that of a newspaper. The first thing that attracts most people to a newspaper is the headline and the fact that the news is short yet interesting. This logic is what Cataphrase intends to deliver.