Looking East
Posted on 24 November 2009
Looking East out our window
Recently a friend asked me about some recommended readings on China which coincided with an annual review for our school’s recommended list of books and film for new employees. There is no lack of books about China. Most of my reading on China has been nonfiction focusing on the Ming to the present. I was just revisiting Jonathan Spence’s The Chan’s Great Continent. He has some good recommendations and he discusses them in the last chapter, “Genius at Play” –
“The three most aesthetically most perfect fictions about China–Kafka’s “the Great Wall,” Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and Calvino’s Invisible Cities–were all written in the twentieth century…. Each was a prolific, hardworking, and supremely gifted writer who played with China briefly in his works, though knowing little about the country or its people. Each of the three chose an aspect of China that was of genuine importance in Chinese history: Kafka the question of authority, Borges the question of origins, and Calvino the question of the observed observer. Each wrote of China without pretension, yet with precision and economy, eschewing the erotic and the sensationalist, creating a purely fabricated whole of astonishing verisimilitude that can sustain endless rereadings.” (226)
Guy Davenport who is known for an assemblage style would also be a nice addition, in particular, “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag” from Da Vinci’s Bicycle. I enjoyed trying to figure out how the pieces are linked. How does Da Vinci, Salai Jacopo, Nixon, Kissinger, Mao, G. Stein and A. Toklas relate to each other? Not only that but it’s the rich cultural and political images that are also included–Freischütz, ragtime, Assissi, Cathay, Columbus, McKinley, Sassetta, Metternich….
Despite that these authors never visited China, they offer a westerner’s perspective. For the many other authors who have visited or lived extensively in China, they offer a variety of conflicting impressions. A must read, or listen, especially since Tianjin is mentioned is Grace Paley’s “Somewhere Else,” from The New Yorker, October 23, 1978, p. 34. This is based on a visit she made to China after they re-opened their doors.
My overall favorite China author is Spence who has a prolific collection of writings. The classic textbook history survey is The Search for Modern China, which covers the period of the Qing dynasty up until the 1990. Many of his others are also good reads: Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-Hsi (1974), The Death of Woman Wang (1978), To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620-1960 (1980), The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution 1895-1980 (1982), The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984), The Question of Hu (1987), Chinese Roundabout: Essays on History and Culture (1993), The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (1999), God’s Chinese Son (1996), Treason by the Book (2002), Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (2008) . He also has several readable articles fouond in the NYReview of Books. Also noteworthy is Spence’s wife, Annping Chin, who has written Four Sisters of Hofei (2002), which is an academic treatment of the lives of these sisters.
One of the first books I read as I flew into China and that has shaped some of my travels and explorations is Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk. This nonfiction reads like a fiction, who-done-it, with a wide span of topics covering Chinese politics, geography of the western desert, archeology, the silk route, museum collections, Buddhism, and the Great Game intrigues.
After reading the above, I also found this a fascinating read, High Tartary by Owen Lattimore (brother to translator Richard Lattimore) and Orville Schell which is a recount of Lattimore’s travels as he meets up with his wife Eleanor for their honeymoon overland travels. I particularly was taken with the descriptions of the locals he met on his way and the conditions of travel. Eleanor had written a book called Turkestan Reunion (1934) that I have not read.
Other reads that should be included are Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine by Jasper Becker
The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Li Zhi-Sui
Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present by Peter Hessler
The River at the Center of the World, Revised: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time by Simon Winchester. (Some claim his western attitude gets in the way.)
Poetry is also a good consideration and Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated by Eliot Weinberger, Octavio Paz is a nice introduction.
Translations by David Hinton are worth serious consideration.
Chinese fiction is not one of my strengths. Short stories by Lu Xun are good place to begin, and a more recent author is Ha Jin. Another short read is Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie.
Pearl Buck should also be mentioned. I favor her novel The Good Earth though I would not recommend the horrible Hollywood film of the same name. Rice by Su Tong tells the story of destruction of a rice merchant family. Last week Su Tong won the Man Asian Literary Prize in Hong Kong for his book The Boat to Redemption concerning a disgraced Communist official. Su’s most famous work is Wives and Concubines, which was later made into Zhang Yimou’s beautiful and frightening film Raise the Red Lantern.
Howard Goldblatt was the translator for Rice and is also the translator for Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong, the previous Man Asian Literary Prize winner. Wolf Totem is not an easy read but a good example of ethnic literature. Since I grew up in Wyoming, the Mongolian (in the case of the novel it is Inner Mongolian) landscape has many similarities with the plains; the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone has had a significant impact on the local environment.
Zhang Yi Mou is my first preference when considering Chinese film, especially his early films like Ju Dou, Red Sorghum, Not One Less, The Road Home, To Live, The Story of Qiu Ju. Another highly respected filmmaker whose films should not be missed is Chen Kaige: Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji) (1993) and Life on a String (1991), The Emperor and the Assassin (1999).
The King of Masks (1996) directed by Wu Tianming is stunning.
A couple of more recent films of note are Beijing Bicycle (Shiqisui de danche) by Wang, Xiaoshuai (2001) and the Tibetan influenced Mountain Patrol: Kekexili filmed on location in the starkly and treacherously beautiful wilderness of western Qinghai, which is one of the coldest films I’ve ever watched. I suggest you keep a blanket close while watching.
There are many good documentaries available now though I have a admiration for the works of Carma Hinton. There is an ongoing lawsuit initiated by Ling Chai against the Long Bow group for their film The Gate of Heavenly Peace which is focused on the Tian’anmen Square protests in 1989 – Ling, one of the student leaders on the square, claims that she was slandered ( see Litigious Ling ). Hinton’s LongBow trilogy about the village where Hinton grew up is a heart-felt and must-see view of life in the post-Mao changing countryside.
When I first started reading about China, I began with Steven Haw’s A Traveller’s History of China. He shares the following saying,
“someone who visits China for week will go home and write a book about it, someone who spends a month there will write no more than an article, and someone who remains for a year or more will be unable to write anything (3).”
I have been in China for over a decade and often feel I cannot adequately write about it; this is a ramble of some of the sources I have enjoyed and felt have given me a better understanding of this historically rich and emergent nation.
What books or sources would you recommend?
For a good blog on books on contemporary China see The China Beat: Blogging How the East is Read.
4 responses to Looking East
Leave a Response
My Social Sites
Linkedin/BethGourley
Twitter/beahgo
YouTube/beahgo
Del.icio.us/beahgo
GMail/Your Name
Blog/Your Name
SLIC/wiki
A timely article from Political Buffer Space and Chinese “Black Jails” in BLDGBLOG that mentions both Kafka’s “Great Wall of China”and Zhang Yimou’s film The Story of Qiu Ju in respect to a recent article in the New York Times about “a secret network of detention centers used to prevent aggrieved citizens from lodging complaints against the Chinese government.”
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Clay Burell, Clay Burell. Clay Burell said: Great post on good China reads http://bit.ly/7PtoGA via http://www.diigo.com/~cburell [...]
What a resource-rich and well-written post. I love librarians.
It’s bookmarked, of course.
My school (Singapore American) has a teacher book-buy program with Kinokuniya, letting us buy ten books off its dreamy shelves (it’s my favorite bookstore, moreso even than Borders). And I just bought all ten for Chinese history, so I’ll share a couple here:
John E. Schrecker’s The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective looks at 20th C. China from the standpoint of Chinese social, political, and economic history as sort of a corrective of the typical Western application of Western concepts to that period. Prose is only okay, but ideas are valuable.
Editors Gregor Benton and Lin Chun’s Was Mao Really a Monster? is a much-needed “Academic Response to Chang and Halliday’s _Mao: The Untold Story_”. A collection of Western and Chinese historians, including a devastating entry from Jonathan Spence, taking fine-grained issue with the academic dishonesty and methodological shoddiness of the popular hatchet-job on Mao. They don’t aim to exculpate Mao as much as to defend honest and balanced historiography.
Thanks for the posts. I’ve subscribed.
Thanks. I always enjoy sharing what others are reading, especially on China topics. You are fortunate to have the Kinokuniya bookstore as well as the Singapore library system. The Singapore bookstores do a nice job of collecting the best that is written in English, be it American, British, Australian, Indian. Yes, “dreamy” is a nice description.