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.

Governing Death, Making Persons

Governing Death, Making Persons
Author: Huwy-min Lucia Liu
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2023-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501767232

Governing Death, Making Persons tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned. Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about the funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semilegal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, Liu sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions.

Dragon's Gate

Dragon's Gate
Author: Vivian Bi
Publisher: Hybrid Publishers
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2020-02-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1925736334

"Dragon's Gate is a superb book, a fascinating story written from the heart and woven into a complex cultural and historical tapestry - a modern classic in the making." - Robert Macklin, author of Dragon and Kangaroo Shi Ding is seventeen. In an attempt to impress a girl, he joins a local Red Guard unit and succeeds in having a nine-year-old boy arrested and a widowed professor of foreign literature driven to a shameful suicide. But when his father's death is also revealed as suicide, Shi Ding is expelled from the gang. He suspects there was more to the relationship between his father and the professor than friendship and he moves into her empty house. There he discovers a library of translations of forbidden Western classics. Himself a born storyteller, he is transfixed by the stories in these books by the likes of Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Hugo, Dickens, and Dumas … Set in China in the mid-60s, Dragon's Gate is about the power of storytelling. Within its overarching narrative, there are stories of little-known worlds: river logging in remote mountains, armed fighting between Red Guard factions, fortune telling on long train journeys, community life in the courtyards of Beijing hutong. Memorable characters abound in this rich and varied tale - characters like Sun Lanfen, the nosy, tough but decent residential compound leader; the blind singer who was struck dumb when he had to sing songs set to Chairman Mao's quotations; and the Buffalo Boy who was reputed to have fathered a hundred children in a Tibetan village. "The unique interweaving of fascinating tales set in exotic places with familiar and much loved western classics makes this book a page turner from beginning to end." - Jane Sydenham-Kwiet, German teacher and translator

Tofu

Tofu
Author: Russell Thomas
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2024-11-11
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1789149908

The surprising, spicy story of this globe-trotting vegetable protein staple. To the untrained eye, there’s nothing as unexciting as tofu, normally regarded as a tasteless, beige, congealed mass of crushed, boiled soybeans. However, tofu more than stands up on its own. Reviled for decades as a vegetarian oddity, the brave, wobbly block has made a comeback. This global history of bean curd stretches from ancient creation myths and tomb paintings, via Chinese poetry and Japanese Buddhist cuisine, to deportations in Soviet Russia and struggles for power on the African continent. It describes the potentially non-Chinese roots of tofu, its myriad types, why “eating tofu” is an insult in Cantonese, and its environmental impact today. Warning: this book actually makes tofu exciting. It’s anything but bland.

Ginkgo Village

Ginkgo Village
Author: Tamara Jacka
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2024-06-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1760466425

Ginkgo Village provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China’s recent tumultuous history. Drawing on ethnographic and life-history research, the book takes readers deep into a village in a mountainous region of central-eastern China known as Eyuwan. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, villagers in this region experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socio‑economic and political change. In the civil war (1927–1949), they were slaughtered in fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), they suffered appalling famine. Since the 1990s, mass labour outmigration has lifted local villagers out of poverty and fuelled major transformations in their circumstances and practices, social and family relationships, and values and aspirations. At the heart of this book are eight tales that recreate Ginkgo Village life and the interactions between villagers and the researchers who visit them. These tales use storytelling to engender an empathetic understanding of Ginkgo Villagers’ often traumatic life experiences; to present concrete details about transformations in everyday village life in an engaging manner; and to explore the challenges and rewards of fieldwork research that attempts empathetic understanding across cultures.

Globalization, Displacement, and Psychiatry

Globalization, Displacement, and Psychiatry
Author: Sanaullah Khan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2023-07-26
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000916111

This book explores diasporic identities and lived experiences that emerge in global patterns of oppression and considers the consequences of treatment and cure when patients experience mental illness due to war, displacement and surveillance. Going beyond psychiatric institutions and conventional psychiatric knowledge by focusing on informal networks, socially contingent value systems, and cultural sites of healing, this book considers how communities utilize trauma productively for healing. The chapters in this volume consider the detection of mental illness and its treatment through claims to citizenship and belonging as well as denials of social identity and psychic experiences by institutions of the state. A multidisciplinary team of contributors and international range of case studies explore topics such as colonial trauma, feminized trauma, reproductive violence, military mental health and more. This book is an essential resource for psychologists, psychiatrists, political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists, as well as scholars and those involved in policymaking and practice.

I Just Hope To Slowly Like You

I Just Hope To Slowly Like You
Author: Angela G VanDenbark
Publisher: Angela G VanDenbark
Total Pages: 93
Release:
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN:

Is she! It was the "monkey's ass" that year that made him blush four times if he moved a little? Ha ha! Worn about even the shoes and couldn't find them, but now they've grabbed them without any effort! You may not know, how did he feel about the "deserving" thing you did that year, pay attention, Noticing so many years, every night he still "hates" to sleep, If she had gone to heaven with no way to go, and rushed to hell beside him, Don't blame him for using perverted revenge tricks on her. Didn't expect her to grow up so much, to become a mature woman, But still moving a little is blushing, making him "play" more and more addicted, But this wasn't enough, after all, she lacked an explanation for him, If she doesn't obediently "Pay" him, he won't let her go easily,

Chinese Capitalisms

Chinese Capitalisms
Author: Y. Chu
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2010-01-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230251358

In Chinese Capitalisms , experts examine the rise of capitalism on China and Taiwan, analyzing impacts exerted by global capitalism, Chinese civilization, and remnants of socialist practice. In focusing on these, they also address longstanding issues such as Weber's China Thesis, state-business relationships, and China's civil society, among others.