Mr. China

Mr. China
Author: Tim Clissold
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2005-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0060761393

The rollicking story of a young man who goes to China with the misguided notion that he will help bring the Chines into the modern world, only to be schooled by the most resourceful and creative operators he would ever meet.

Mr. Selden's Map of China

Mr. Selden's Map of China
Author: Timothy Brook
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2013-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1620401444

From the author of the award-winning Vermeer's Hat, a historical detective story decoding a long-forgotten link between seventeenth century Europe and China. Timothy Brook's award-winning Vermeer's Hat unfolded the early history of globalization, using Vermeer's paintings to show how objects like beaver hats and porcelain bowls began to circulate around the world. Now he plumbs the mystery of a single artifact that offers new insights into global connections centuries old. In 2009, an extraordinary map of China was discovered in Oxford's Bodleian Library-where it had first been deposited 350 years before, then stowed and forgotten for nearly a century. Neither historians of China nor cartography experts had ever seen anything like it. It was so odd that experts would have declared it a fake-yet records confirmed it had been delivered to Oxford in 1659. The “Selden Map,” as it is known, was a puzzle that needing solving. Brook, a historian of China, set out to explore the riddle. His investigation will lead readers around this elegant, enigmatic work of art, and from the heart of China, via the Southern Ocean, to the court of King James II. In the story of Selden's map, he reveals for us the surprising links between an English scholar and merchants half a world away, and offers novel insights into the power and meaning that a single map can hold. Brook delivers the same anecdote-rich narrative, intriguing characters, and unexpected historical connections that made Vermeer's Hat an instant classic.

Mr. China's Son

Mr. China's Son
Author: Liyi He
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2018-02-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429963505

He Liyi belongs to one of China's minorities, the Bai, and he lives in a remote area of northwestern Yunnan Province. In 1979 his wife sold her fattest pig to buy him a shortwave radio. He spent every spare moment listening to the BBC and VOA in order to improve the English he had learned at college between 1950 and 1953. For "further practice," he decided to write down his life story in English. Humorous and unfiltered by translation, his autobiography is direct and personal, full of richly descriptive images and phrases from his native Bai language. At the time of He Liyi's graduation, English was being vilified as the language of the imperialists, so the job he was assigned had nothing to do with his education. In 1958 he was labeled a rightist and sent to a "reeducation-through-labor farm." Spirited away by truck on the eve of his marriage, Mr. He spent years in the labor camp, where he schemed to garner favor from the authorities, who nevertheless shamed him publicly and told him that all his problems "belong to contradictions between the people and the enemy." After his release in 1962, the talented Mr. He had no choice but to return to his native village as a peasant. His stratagems for survival, which included stealing "nightsoil" from public toilets and extracting peach-pit oil from thousands of peaches, personify the peasant's universal struggle to endure during those difficult years. He Liyi's autobiography recounts nearly all the major events of China's recent history, including the Japanese occupation, the Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949, Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the experience of the labor camps, and changes brought about by China's dramatic re-opening to the world since Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, No other book so poignantly reveals the travails of the common person and village life under China's tempestuous Communist government, which He Liyi ironically refers to as "Mr. China." Yet he describes his saga of poverty and hardship with humor and a surprising lack of bitterness. And rarely has there been such an intimate, frank view of how a Chinese man thinks and feels about personal relationships, revealed in dialogue and letters to his two wives. He Liyi's autobiography stands as perhaps the most readable and authentic account available in English of life in rural China. He Liyi's previous book is The Spring of Butterflies (London and New York, 1985), a translation of Chinese folk tales.

Mr. Smith Goes to China

Mr. Smith Goes to China
Author: Jessica Hanser
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2019-07-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300245076

An account of eighteenth-century global commerce as seen through the lives of three Scottish traders, “written with verve and filled with arresting details” (Tonio Andrade, author of The Gunpowder Age). This book delves into the lives of three Scottish private traders—George Smith of Bombay, George Smith of Canton, and George Smith of Madras—and uses them as lenses through which to explore the inner workings of Britain’s imperial expansion and global network of trade, revealing how an unstable credit system and a financial crisis ultimately led to greater British intervention in India and China. “This book is a history of British seafaring and imperialism, written largely from a micro-level perspective, placing the focus on individual traders rather than the East India Company as a whole. But it is not only an imperial history. It also unravels the interwoven financial, political and social relations between Britain, China and India in the eighteenth century . . . Hanser has consulted an impressively wide range of archival sources in different languages and located in various countries, from private letters to periodicals, and from official Chinese documents to East India Company reports. Her work contributes to our understanding of 18th-century British imperial history.” —Reviews in History

Mr. Science and Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution

Mr. Science and Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution
Author: Chunjuan Nancy Wei
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 0739149741

China is emerging as a new superpower in science and technology, reflected in the success of its spacecraft and high-velocity Maglev trains. While many seek to understand the rise of China as a technologically-based power, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s may seem an unlikely era to explore for these insights. Despite the widespread verdict of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as an unmitigated disaster for China, a number of recent scholars have called for re-examining Maoist science--both in China and in the West. At one time Western observers found much to admire in Chairman Mao's mass science, his egalitarian effort to take science out of the ivory tower and place it in the hands of the disenfranchised peasant, the loyal worker, and the patriot soldier. Chunjuan Nancy Wei and Darryl E. Brock have assembled a rich mix of talents and topics related to the fortunes and misfortunes of science, technology, and medicine in modern China, while tracing its roots to China's other great student revolution--the May Fourth Movement. Historians of science, political scientists, mathematicians, and others analyze how Maoist science served modern China in nationalism, socialism, and nation-building--and also where it failed the nation and the Chinese people. If the Cultural Revolution contributed to China's emerging space program and catalyzed modern malaria treatments based on Traditional Chinese Medicine, it also provided the origins of a science talent gap and the milieu from which a one-child policy would arise. Given the fundamental importance of China today, and of East Asia generally, it is imperative to have a better understanding of its most recent scientific history, but especially that history in a period of crisis and how that crisis was resolved. What is at issue here is not only the specific domain of the history of science, but the social and scientific policies of China generally as they developed and were applied prior to, during, and after the Cultural Revolution.

Thank You, Mr. Nixon

Thank You, Mr. Nixon
Author: Gish Jen
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593319907

The acclaimed, award-winning author of The Resisters takes measure of the fifty years since the opening of China and its unexpected effects on the lives of ordinary people. It is a unique book that only Jen could write—a story collection accruing the power of a novel as it proceeds—a work that Cynthia Ozick has called “an art beyond art. It is life itself.” Beginning with a cheery letter penned by a Chinese girl in heaven to “poor Mr. Nixon” in hell, Gish Jen embarks on a fictional journey through U.S.-China relations, capturing the excitement of a world on the brink of tectonic change. Opal Chen reunites with her Chinese sisters after forty years; newly cosmopolitan Lulu Koo wonders why Americans “like to walk around in the woods with the mosquitoes”; Hong Kong parents go to extreme lengths to reestablish contact with their “number-one daughter” in New York; and Betty Koo, brought up on “no politics, just make money,” finds she must reassess her mother’s philosophy. With their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these eleven linked stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history, capturing an extraordinary era in an extraordinary way. Delightful, provocative, and powerful, Thank You, Mr. Nixon furnishes yet more proof of Gish Jen’s eminent place among American storytellers.

Mister Jiu's in Chinatown

Mister Jiu's in Chinatown
Author: Brandon Jew
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1984856510

JAMES BEARD AWARD WINNER • The acclaimed chef behind the Michelin-starred Mister Jiu’s restaurant shares the past, present, and future of Chinese cooking in America through 90 mouthwatering recipes. ONE OF THE TEN BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle • ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: Glamour • “Brandon Jew’s affection for San Francisco’s Chinatown and his own Chinese heritage is palpable in this cookbook, which is both a recipe collection and a portrait of a district rich in history.”—Fuchsia Dunlop, James Beard Award-winning author of The Food of Sichuan Brandon Jew trained in the kitchens of California cuisine pioneers and Michelin-starred Italian institutions before finding his way back to Chinatown and the food of his childhood. Through deeply personal recipes and stories about the neighborhood that often inspires them, this groundbreaking cookbook is an intimate account of how Chinese food became American food and the making of a Chinese American chef. Jew takes inspiration from classic Chinatown recipes to create innovative spins like Sizzling Rice Soup, Squid Ink Wontons, Orange Chicken Wings, Liberty Roast Duck, Mushroom Mu Shu, and Banana Black Sesame Pie. From the fundamentals of Chinese cooking to master class recipes, he interweaves recipes and techniques with stories about their origins in Chinatown and in his own family history. And he connects his classical training and American roots to Chinese traditions in chapters celebrating dim sum, dumplings, and banquet-style parties. With more than a hundred photographs of finished dishes as well as moving and evocative atmospheric shots of Chinatown, this book is also an intimate portrait—a look down the alleyways, above the tourist shops, and into the kitchens—of the neighborhood that changed the flavor of America.

Peril

Peril
Author: Bob Woodward
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2023-01-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 198218292X

The transition from President Donald J. Trump to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. stands as one of the most dangerous periods in American history. But as #1 internationally bestselling author Bob Woodward and acclaimed reporter Robert Costa reveal for the first time, it was far more than just a domestic political crisis. Woodward and Costa interviewed more than 200 people at the center of the turmoil, resulting in more than 6,000 pages of transcripts—and a spellbinding and definitive portrait of a nation on the brink. This classic study of Washington takes readers deep inside the Trump White House, the Biden White House, the 2020 campaign, and the Pentagon and Congress, with eyewitness accounts of what really happened. Intimate scenes are supplemented with never-before-seen material from secret orders, transcripts of confidential calls, diaries, emails, meeting notes and other personal and government records, making Peril an unparalleled history. It is also the first inside look at Biden’s presidency as he began his presidency facing the challenges of a lifetime: the continuing deadly pandemic and millions of Americans facing soul-crushing economic pain, all the while navigating a bitter and disabling partisan divide, a world rife with threats, and the hovering, dark shadow of the former president.

Hunan

Hunan
Author: Mr Peng
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2014-05-05
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1409052443

Founded in 1982 by Mr Peng, Hunan is a legendary London restaurant which attracts customers from all over the world. At Hunan, diners don’t choose – they simply say what they don’t eat and how spicy they like their food. Mr Peng then does the rest, serving up small portions with the emphasis on sharing many courses. The orders are hand-written and are sent down to the kitchen by a chute and the food travels up in a dumb waiter. Mr Peng is a firm believer in simplicity. Hunan is a landmark book that captures the essence of a unique menu from a unique character. Among the 70 must-have recipes are Mr Peng’s ‘absurdly delicious’ prawn dumplings, lettuce wraps filled with diced chicken, ‘which you just pop into your mouth and scrunch’ and mouth-melting double-cooked pork. As Mr Peng says: 'I often say to people I've only just met: I'm a very strange person. And then I have to explain: food is my life. Despite being close to 70 I'm still in the kitchen at Hunan, on the floor almost every day doing prep, working the wok and talking to guests, most of whom have been regulars for years. The food is the only thing which has changed, and which changes almost daily. It is really about bringing out the most in the ingredients. Subtle blends of chilli and Sichuan peppercorns push enormous pearly scallops to the edge while the gentle salty miso cuts through the tenderest slivers of corn-fed chicken. It is possible because the ingredients I use are fresh and of faultless quality.

The Funeral of Mr. Wang

The Funeral of Mr. Wang
Author: Andrew B. Kipnis
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2021-07-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520381971

The funeral of Mr. Wang -- Of transitions and transformations -- Of space and place : Separation and distinction in the homes of the dead -- Of strangers and kin : moral family and ghastly strangers in urban sociality -- Of gifts and commodities : Spending on the dead while providing for the living -- Of rules and regulations : governing mourning -- Of souls and spirits : secularization and its limits -- Of dreams and memories : a ghost story from a land where haunting is banned -- Epilogue.