Huang Xiang 黄翔, the protagonist of this book, was born on 26th December 1941 in Guidong county, Hunan province of central China. After the Communists came to power in 1949, he was imprisoned six times and severely persecuted for his free-spirited writing and his campaigns for human rights. For more than thirty years, this self-educated poet and writer, wrote secretly against the bondage of totalitarian ideology to safe-guard the freedom of speech. According to the author of the book, Huang is a great dark poet who has expressed the painful memories, fears and struggles that haunted his life creating wonderful poetic beauty in the darkness. His poetic creation is a miracle in the history of Chinese contemporary literature. We may say that Huang's identity as an unknown dark poet is conditioned by his personal, emotional and tragic experiences of struggles while facing historical events such as the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, the April 5th Movement in 1976, the Democracy Wall Movement in 1978 and the Pro-Democracy Movement in 1989 in China.

The harshness of the modern Communist regime has far exceeded that of all past despots, as the PRC’s founder Mao Zedong openly acknowledged: “What was Emperor Qin Shi Huang? He only buried 460 scholars, but we buried 46,000. During the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, didn’t we kill some counterrevolutionary intellectuals? I’ve discussed this with pro-democracy advocates: ‘You call us Qin Shi Huang as an insult, but we’ve surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundred-fold.’ Some people curse us as dictators like Qin Shi Huang. We must categorically accept this as factually accurate. Unfortunately, you haven’t said enough and leave it to us to say the rest”. In fact, the number of writers killed under CPC rule far exceeds 46,000, and the number imprisoned is incalculable. This volume collects 64 cases occurring from 1947 to 2010, with one emblematic case for each year, but these represent just the tip of the iceberg. The CPC has officially acknowledged that 550,000 people were labeled “Rightists” from 1957 to 1959, mostly through various types of literary inquisition, making the 130-plus cases of the Qianlong period pale in comparison. This volume describes the cases of 12 “Rightist” victims – Sun Mingxun, Feng Xuefeng, Lin Xiling, Ding Ling, Ai Qing, Lin Zhao, Wang Ruowang, Wang Zaoshi, Chen Fengxiao, Yuan Changying, Nie Gannu and Liu Binyan, obviously only a minute proportion. In the single case of the “anti-Party” novel Liu Zhidan, more than 10,000 people were persecuted, the most wide-ranging literary inquisition in Chinese history. In the case of Wang Shenyou’s love letter, Wang ripped up the letter before sending it, but he was forced to rewrite it and was then executed for his “unspoken criticism”. A multitude of such cases demonstrates that literary inquisition has reached its fullest flowering under CPC rule.

In Colors of Veracity, Vera Schwarcz condenses four decades of teaching and scholarship about China to raise fundamental questions about the nature of truth and history. In clear and vivid prose, she addresses contemporary moral dilemmas with a highly personal sense of ethics and aesthetics. Drawing on classical sources in Hebrew and Chinese (as well as several Greek and Japanese texts), Schwarcz brings deep and varied cultural references to bear on the question of truth and falsehood in human consciousness. An attentiveness to connotations and nuance is apparent throughout her work, which redefines both the Jewish understanding of emet (a notion of truth that encompasses authenticity) and the Chinese commitment to zhen (a vision of the real that comprises the innermost sincerity of the seeker’s heart-mind). Works of art, from contemporary calligraphy and installations to fake Chinese characters and a Jewish menorah from Roman times, shed light light on the historian’s task of giving voice to the dread-filled past. Following in the footsteps of literary scholar Geoffrey Hartman, Schwarcz expands on the “Philomela Project, which calls on historians to find new ways of conveying truth, especially when political authorities are bent on enforcing amnesia of past traumatic events. Truth matters, even if it cannot be mapped in its totality. Veracity is shown again and again to be neither black nor white. Schwarcz’ accomplishment is a subtle depiction of “fractured luminosity,” which inspires and sustains the moral conviction of those who pursue truth against all odds.

This facing-page edition makes translations of over 150 poems of contemporary Chinese poet/author Huang Xiang available to the Western world for the first time in a collection. Since he is subject to a long-term ban against publication of any of his writings in his native China, only a few of his poems have ever been read and translated in the West. A member of the proscribed classes by virtue of his birth, he was subjected to harassment, imprisonment and brutality from his childhood until his departure from China in 1997. His writings have already gained high and deserved respect in the small scholarly circle that is familiar with them in China and the West. Xiang outside China, plus many that refer to him or quote his works, as well as general works on Chinese poetry. The long biographical introduction will be of great value to scholars who wish to pursue the origins of Underground Literature in which Huang is a major figure, and the later Menglung misty, obscure) poetry that followed it. The poems themselves are in clear recitable English. The book's composition, with the original Chinese on the left and English on the right, matched line for line, offers an excellent pedagogical tool, as well as a subject for study by critics, commentators, and students of language. The book also includes a section of personal photographs, and a foreword by Huang Xiang.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive index. 351 color photos or illustrations, Free of charge in digital format on Google Books,

Learn how to process your own grief--as well as family, community, and global grief--with this fierce and openhearted guide to healing in an unjust world. In unsettling and uncertain times, the individual and collective heartbreak that lives in our bodies and communities can feel insurmountable. Many of us have been conditioned by the dominant culture to not name, focus on, or wade through the difficulties of our lives. But in order to heal, we must make space for grief and prioritize our wholeness, our humanity, and our inherent divinity. In Finding Refuge, social justice activist, social worker, and yoga teacher Michelle Cassandra Johnson offers those who feel brokenhearted, helpless, confused, powerless, and desperate the tools they need to be present with their grief while also remaining openhearted. Through powerful personal narrative and meditation and journaling practices at the end of each chapter that explore being present with your heart, Michelle empowers us to see that each of us has a role to play in building enough momentum to take intentional action and shift what is unsettled and unjust in the world. Finding Refuge is an invitation to pick up the shattered parts of yourself and remember your strength, wholeness, and sacredness through this practice of presence and attending to your grief.

Deborah Fallows has spent a lot of her life learning languages and traveling around the world. But nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying learning the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering behavior and habits of its people, and its culture's conundrums. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language - a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar - became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and the overflowing humanity of modern China. Fallows learned, for example, that the abrupt, blunt way of speaking which Chinese people sometimes use isn't rudeness, but is, in fact a way to acknowledge and honor the closeness between two friends. She learned that English speakers' trouble with hearing or saying tones-the variations in inflection that can change a word's meaning-is matched by Chinese speakers' inability not to hear tones, or to even take a guess at understanding what might have been meant when foreigners misuse them. Dreaming in Chinese is the story of what Deborah Fallows discovered about the Chinese language, and how that helped her make sense of what had at first seemed like the chaos and contradiction of everyday life in China.

From the renowned Chinese poet in exile comes a gorgeous and shocking account of his years in prison following the Tiananmen Square protests.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive index. 372 photographs and illustrations. Free of charge in digital format on Google Books.

"From the cry of a tiny insect, one can hear the sound of a vast world. . . ." So begins Zhang Daye’s preface to The World of a Tiny Insect, his haunting memoir of war and its aftermath. In 1861, when China’s devastating Taiping rebellion began, Zhang was seven years old. The Taiping rebel army occupied Shaoxing, his hometown, and for the next two years, he hid from Taiping soldiers, local bandits, and imperial troops and witnessed gruesome scenes of violence and death. He lost friends and family and nearly died himself from starvation, illness, and encounters with soldiers on a rampage. Written thirty years later, The World of a Tiny Insect gives voice to this history. A rare premodern Chinese literary work depicting a child’s perspective, Zhang’s sophisticated text captures the macabre images, paranoia, and emotional excess that defined his wartime experience and echoed through his adult life. The structure, content, and imagery of The World of a Tiny Insect offer a carefully constructed, fragmented narrative that skips in time and probes the relationships between trauma and memory, revealing both history and its psychic impact. Xiaofei Tian’s annotated translation includes an introduction that situates The World of a Tiny Insect in Chinese history and literature and explores the relevance of the book to the workings of traumatic memory.