Lost In China

A sharply observed, hilarious account of Troost's adventures in China- a complex, fascinating country with enough dangers and delicacies to keep him, and readers, endlessly entertained.

Since 1997, the walls of law around Hong Kong have come under attack. This book examines the strategies of resistance.

"Note on sources": p. [xxv]-xxvi.

Looks at the fate of Hong Kong’s unique culture since its reversion to China.

To this day, China remains an enigma. Ancient, complex and fast moving, it defies easy understanding. Ever since he was a boy, Alexandre Trudeau has been fascinated by this great county. Recounting his experiences in the China of recent years, Trudeau visits artists and migrant workers, townspeople and rural farmers. Often accompanied by a young Chinese journalist, Vivien, he explores realities caught in time between the China of our memories and the thrust of progress. The China he seeks out lurks in hints and shadows. It flickers dimly amidst all the glare and noise. The people he encounters along the way give up but small secrets yet each revelation comes as a surprise that jolts us from our preconceived ideas and forces us to challenge our most secure notions. Barbarian Lost, Trudeau’s first book, is an insightful and witty account of the dynamic changes going on right now in China, as well as a look back into the deeper history of this highly codified society. On the ground with the women and men who make China tick., Trudeau shines new light on the country as only a traveller with his storytelling abilities could.

In 1997 journalist Karin Evans walked into an orphanage in southern China and met her new daughter, a beautiful one-year-old baby girl. In this fateful moment Evans became part of a profound, increasingly common human drama that links abandoned Chinese girls with foreigners who have traveled many miles to complete their families. At once a compelling personal narrative and an evocative portrait of contemporary China, The Lost Daughters of China has also served as an invaluable guide for thousands of readers as they navigated the process of adopting from China. However, much has changed in terms of the Chinese government?s policies on adoption since this book was originally published and in this revised and updated edition Evans addresses these developments. Also new to this edition is a riveting chapter in which she describes her return to China in 2000 to adopt her second daughter who was nearly three at the time. Many of the first girls to be adopted from China are now in the teens (China only opened its doors to adoption in the 1990s), and this edition includes accounts of their experiences growing up in the US and, in some cases, of returning to China in search of their roots. Illuminating the real-life stories behind the statistics, The Lost Daughters of China is an unforgettable account of the red thread that winds form China?s orphanages to loving families around the globe.

From the 1790s until World War I, Western museums filled their shelves with art and antiquities from around the world. These objects are now widely regarded as stolen from their countries of origin, and demands for their repatriation grow louder by the day. In The Compensations of Plunder, Justin M. Jacobs brings to light the historical context of the exodus of cultural treasures from northwestern China. Based on a close analysis of previously neglected archives in English, French, and Chinese, Jacobs finds that many local elites in China acquiesced to the removal of art and antiquities abroad, understanding their trade as currency for a cosmopolitan elite. In the decades after the 1911 Revolution, however, these antiquities went from being “diplomatic capital” to disputed icons of the emerging nation-state. A new generation of Chinese scholars began to criminalize the prior activities of archaeologists, erasing all memory of the pragmatic barter relationship that once existed in China. Recovering the voices of those local officials, scholars, and laborers who shaped the global trade in antiquities, The Compensations of Plunder brings historical grounding to a highly contentious topic in modern Chinese history and informs heated debates over cultural restitution throughout the world.

Shanghai's "Literary Comet" When the avant-garde writer Mu Shiying was assassinated in 1940, China lost one of its greatest modernist writers while Shanghai lost its most detailed chronicler of the city's Jazz-Age nightlife. Mu's highly original stream-of-consciousness approach to short story writing deserves to be re-examined and re-read. As Andrew Field argues, Mu advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular expression of May Fourth giants Lu Xun and Lao She to reveal even more starkly the alienation of a city trapped between the forces of civilization and barbarism in the 1930s. Mu Shiying: China's Lost Modernist includes translations of six short stories, four of which have not appeared before in English. Each story focuses on Mu's key obsessions: the pleasurable yet anxiety-ridden social and sexual relationships in the modern city, and the decadent maelstrom of consumption and leisure epitomized by the dance hall and nightclub. In his introduction, Field situates Mu's work within the transnational and hedonistic environment of inter-war Shanghai, the city's entertainment economy, as well as his place within the wider arena of Jazz-Age literature from Berlin, Paris, Tokyo and New York. His dazzling chronicle of modern Shanghai gave rise to Chinese modernist literature. His meteoric career as a writer, a flâneur, and allegedly a double agent testifies to cosmopolitanism at its most flamboyant, brilliant and enigmatic. Andrew Field's translation is concise and lively, and his account of Mu Shiying's adventure in modern Shanghai is itself a fascinating story. This is a splendid book for anyone interested in the dynamics of Shanghai modern." — David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University "Mu Shiying was one of China's pioneer modernists, and his stories are full of inventive touches, including his own experimental technique of stream-of-consciousness, that evoke the emergent splendour of urban decadence of Shanghai in the 1930s. This English translation of his most important stories edited and translated by an acknowledged historian of Shanghai culture is long overdue." — Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China: 1930–1945 "During his short, tumultuous life, Mu Shiying produced a small oeuvre of remarkable short stories that stand out in the wider context of modern Chinese literature. He captures the essence of the Shanghai jazz age with his racy, musical, and often fragmented prose, which blends a genuine excitement about the wonders of "the Paris of the East" with an at times sobering undertone of social critique. Unlike some of the more explicitly left-wing writers of his time, Mu never relinquishes the medium for the message. He is first and foremost a writer of experimental, original work that even nowadays has lost nothing of its power. As a teacher of modern Chinese literature, I am delighted that this new translation has become available." —Michel Hockx, Director, SOAS China Institute