Author: Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith
Publisher: University of Louisiana
ISBN: 9781935754800
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"It is the summer of 1979, the year everyone anticipates the long awaited release of Apocalypse Now, America's frustration with inflation and the long lines to the gas pumps; the top story on every news channel is President Jimmy Carter and his administration's grim dilemma in trying to rescue the American hostages in Iran, and our 10-year-old narrator, Long Vanh, is burdened with the secret his mother, Vu-An, entrusted him to keep: not to tell anyone of her desire to return to Vietnam to be with her father who is serving hard labor in a reeducation camp. Because Long Vanh is a con lai--half Vietnamese, half black--he believes he can become the obedient son despite his shortcomings of not knowing how to decipher the accent marks adorning the words in the letters she receives from the old country, his inability to speak the language, or even maneuver chopsticks properly. He believes if he can compensate for his flaws, she will want to stay in "Asia Minor", an enclave of Los Angeles comprised of veterans and their foreign war wives. She will stay in America to keep the family intact and forget that she ever packed her Samsonite with ao dais, letters, and photographs she made him store in his closet, make her forget that she ever taught him how to lie to anyone who phones that she doesn't live here anymore, that he can even tell them that she is dead. The Land South of the Clouds serves as the companion piece to The Land Baron's Sun: The Story of Lý Loc and His Seven Wives. It is the story of immigrant families meshing into the fabric of American culture, their memories of the old country weighing on their conscience and the repercussions they feel even from thousands of miles away on another continent, in another world, another life"--
Author: Georgia Freedman
Publisher: Kyle Books
ISBN: 0857835637
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Twenty-four of the country's minority groups call Yunnan home, each retaining their own traditions. Stretching from the Himalayan plateau down to the subtropics, Yunnan encompasses extremes from alpine meadows to rainforest. It is the most diverse region in China culturally, biologically, and meteorologically. On a culinary level, this means Yunnan is one of the most delicious places on earth. The region is famous for its mushrooms, hams, pickles, edible flowers, its use of potatoes, and its love of chillies and Sichuan peppercorns. Yunnan's food is exciting and unfamiliar, but much of it is actually quite easy to make, using simple techniques already familiar to Western cooks. Each chapter covers a different area featuring its cardinal recipes such as Tibetan momo dumplings, Dai cucumber salad with peanuts, the famed "crossingthe- bridge" noodles of Kunming, Eastern-style fried rice with ham, potatoes, and peas, and roasted eggplant salad from near the Burmese border. Complete with profiles of local cooks, artisans, and farmers, as well as breathtaking on-location photography, Cooking South of the Clouds takes readers on an unforgettable journey through the land of Shangri-La and introduces a new world of flavours.
Author: Lucien Miller
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295807008
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
The tales included here represent all of Yunnan Province’s officially designated ethnic minorities, and include creation myths, romances, historical legends, tales explaining natural phenomena, ghost stories, and festival tales. The tales are peopled by memorable characters, such as the Tibetan mother who, reborn as a cow, comforts and helps her daughter into her harsh life as a slave girl; the two Kucong sisters who marry snakes; and the bodiless Lahu “head-baby” who grows up to win one of the earth-god Poyana’s daughters in marriage. Chosen for their representativeness, aesthetic appeal, and variety, the stories provide rich examples of the folk traditions of Southwest China. South of the Clouds includes introductions and an appendix which describe the places and people of Yunnan, analyzethe literary and psychological characteristics of their stories, give the sources of the tales, and explain the methodolgy of collecting folk literature in China.
Author: Bo Petersen
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611175526
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
In Washing Our Hands in the Clouds, Bo Petersen masterfully crafts a reflection on the Civil War, emancipation, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement in the personal story of how it affected one man's life in a specific South Carolina locale. Petersen's accomplishment is that, in studying the Pee Dee region of Dillon and Marion Counties, he illuminates those issues throughout the Deep South. Through conversations with Joe Williams, his family, and acquaintances, white and black, Petersen merges the Williams family history back to Joe's great-great-grandfather, Scipio Williams, with the lives and fortunes of four generations of South Carolinians—black and white. Scipio, the family progenitor, was a man free in spirit and action before the Civil War destroyed chattel slavery. Scipio was a free black farmer who worked land that he owned in the Pee Dee before and after the war and during the worst days of Jim Crow white supremacy. Petersen uses the Williams family genealogy, neighborhood, and, most important, their farmlands to understand Pee Dee and South Carolina history from the 1860s to the present. In his research he discovers historical currents that run deeper than events—currents of agriculture, land ownership, and allegiance to native soil—and transcend the march of time and carry the Williams family through slavery, war, Jim Crow, and economic dislocation to today's stories of Joe Williams. In gathering what Petersen describes as a collection of front porch stories, he also writes a history of what matters most to this family and this locale. The resulting narrative is surprising, unconventional, and true for all families in all places. In Dillon County, tobacco production followed cotton farming. Old-time logging coexisted with textile factories. Jim Crow gave way to uncertain prospects of racial harmony. Those were monumental changes of circumstance, but they did not change human character. Washing Our Hands in the Clouds is a history of human character, of life that endures outside of the restraints of time. To understand this phenomenon is to realize that both Scipio and Joe and the generations between them wash their hands in the timeless clouds of South Carolina's sky.
Author: Seth Faison
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429973684
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
South of the Clouds offers a fascinating, intimate portrait of China by telling the story of an American man who ventures into its hidden realms---romance, politics, the criminal underworld, and Tibet. As he matures from a wide-eyed student into a journalist and a seasoned observer, he develops a passion for uncovering secrets, about China and about himself. The author navigates his way past forbidding walls to peek inside the dark corners of Chinese society, relying on a remarkable collection of friends and acquaintances who help guide the way: an embittered policeman in Xian, a gay professor in Shanghai, and a Buddhist monk in Tibet, who presides at an ancient burial ritual where the corpse is carved up and fed to wild vultures. The Tiananmen Square massacre, people smuggling, and the Falun Gong movement are among the political and social upheavals that the author explains as he witnesses China's uncertain road toward capitalism and its place in the modern world. Along his travels, the author wrestles with his own cultural identity, his sexuality, and his spiritual bearings. He finds an erotic outlet in the Chinese "Sauna Massage" and a stirring emotional connection with Jin Xing, a brilliant choreographer and China's first openly transsexual citizen. Ultimately, he discovers the answer to lifelong questions on a mountaintop in Tibet. Seth Faison, with a subtle understanding of Chinese culture, brings past and present events to life in a thought-provoking account of this mysterious nation and its people.
Author: Anthony Doerr
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982168455
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 608
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Book Description
On the New York Times bestseller list for over 20 weeks * A New York Times Notable Book * A National Book Award Finalist * Named a Best Book of the Year by Fresh Air, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Associated Press, and many more “If you’re looking for a superb novel, look no further.” —The Washington Post From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, comes the instant New York Times bestseller that is a “wildly inventive, a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences” (The New York Times Book Review). Among the most celebrated and beloved novels of recent times, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope, and a book. In the 15th century, an orphan named Anna lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople. She learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds what might be the last copy of a centuries-old book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the army that will lay siege to the city. His path and Anna’s will cross. In the present day, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno rehearses children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno, and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders whose lives are gloriously intertwined. Doerr’s dazzling imagination transports us to worlds so dramatic and immersive that we forget, for a time, our own.
Author:
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231520980
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Compiled by a leading scholar of Chinese poetry, Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown is the first collection of Chan (Zen) poems to be situated within Chan thought and practice. Combined with exquisite paintings by Charles Chu, the anthology compellingly captures the ideological and literary nuances of works that were composed, paradoxically, to "say more by saying less," and creates an unparalleled experience for readers of all backgrounds. Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown includes verse composed by monk-poets of the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. Their style ranges from the direct vernacular to the evocative and imagistic. Egan's faithful and elegant translations of poems by Han Shan, Guanxiu, and Qiji, among many others, do justice to their perceptions and insights, and his detailed notes and analyses unravel centuries of Chan metaphor and allusion. In these gems, monk-poets join mainstream ideas on poetic function to religious reflection and proselytizing, carving out a distinct genre that came to influence generations of poets, critics, and writers. The simplicity of Chan poetry belies its complex ideology and sophisticated language, elements Egan vividly explicates in his religious and literary critique. His interpretive strategies enable a richer understanding of Mahayana Buddhism, Chan philosophy, and the principles of Chinese poetry.
Author: David Atwill
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1804290548
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
A history of the Panthay Rebellion against the Chinese imperial court The Panthay Rebellion of 1856–1873 held the armies of the Qing dynasty at bay for nearly two decades. This account by David Atwill offers a remarkable panorama of the cosmopolitan frontier society from which the rebellion sprang. The rebel leader, Du Wenxiu, took the name of Sultan Suleiman, established a Muslim court at the ancient city of Dali and sought to unite the population against Manchu rule, with considerable success at a time when the Qing faced threats in all parts of the empire. Atwill offers the first detailed account of Du’s seventeen-year rule and upturns a historiography that filters the Panthay Rebellion through the political and military lenses of the Chinese centre. The insurrection was not rooted solely in Hui hatred of the Han Chinese, he argues, nor was it primarily Islamic in orientation. Atwill draws out the multitudinous complexities of Yunnan Province, China’s most ethnically diverse region and a crossroads for Tibetan, Chinese and Southeast Asian culture. The Panthay Rebellion was the last of a series of mid-century Chinese revolts to be suppressed. Its downfall marked the beginning of a renewed offensive by the imperial government to control its border regions and influence the cultures of those who lived there.
Author: Peter Lamborn Wilson
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868915
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
The Rig Veda, written in India about 1500BC, praises a holy plant called Soma, which is sacrificed and consumed, granting the drinker an experience of enlightenment and ecstasy. The late Gordon Wasson identified Soma as a "magic mushroom," Amanita muscaria, and he and his followers discovered that such Indo-Europeans as the ancient Greeks, Iranians and Norse had also used a Soma-type plant. In Ploughing the Clouds Peter Lamborn Wilson investigates the probability of a Soma cult in ancient Ireland, tracing clues in Irish (and other Celtic) lore. By comparing Celtic folktales, romances, epics and topographic lore with the Rig Veda, he uncovers the Irish branch of the great Indo-European tradition of psychedelic (or "entheogenic") shamanism, and even reconstructs some of its secret rituals. He uses this comparative material to illuminate the deep meaning of the Soma-function in all cultures: the entheogenic origin of "poetic frenzy," the link between intoxication and inspiration.
Author: Tom Hart Dyke
Publisher: Corgi
ISBN: 9780552165716
Category : Darien (Panama and Colombia)
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
"The Darien Gap is a place of legend. The only break in the Pan-American highway, which runs from Alaska to the tip of South America, it is an almost impregnable strip of swamp, jungle and cloud forest between the vast landmasses of North and South America. Stories of abduction and murder there are rife and in recent years more people have successfully climbed Everest or trekked to the South Pole than have crossed the Darien Gap. In 2000, Tom Hart Dyke, a young botanist, set off to Central America with one thing on his mind- orchids. He knew that in order to find the rare and beautiful species he so fervently admired, he would have to visit some of the most inhospitable places on earth. Unbeknown to Tom, another young explorer, Paul Winder, was backpacking through the area at the same time. Though he sometimes worked freelance in the City of London, Paul was a fearless and intrepid traveller, happier scaling volcanoes than lounging on beaches. In every bar and cafe along his route, rumours abounded of the Darien Gap - and the more he heard, the greater became his desire to make the journey. Pure chance brought Paul and Tom together in northern Mexico; they formed an instant bond
