The Woman Who Discovered Printing by T.H. Barrett

This beguiling book asks a set of unusual and fascinating questions—why is early Chinese printing so little acknowledged, despite anticipating Gutenberg by centuries? Why are the religious elements of all early printing overlooked? And why did printing in China not have the immediate obvious impact it did in Europe?

T. H. Barrett, a leading scholar of medieval China, brings us the answers through the intriguing story of Empress Wu (AD 625–705) and the revolution in printing that occurred during her rule. Linking Asian and European history with substantial new research into Chinese sources, Barrett identifies methods of transmitting texts before printing and explains the historical context of seventh-century China. He explores the dynastic reasons behind Empress Wu’s specific interest in printing and the motivating role of her private religious beliefs. He also deduces from eighth- and ninth-century Chinese records an explanation for the lesser impact of the introduction of printing in China than in Europe. 

As Renaissance Europe was later astonished to learn of China’s achievement, so today’s reader will be fascinated by this engaging perspective on the history of printing and the technological superiority of Empress Wu’s China.

The Life of Madame Mao by Ross Terrill

A peculiar facet of China's history is that its greatest villains have often been women. The evil Empress Wu lives on in legend, as does another ogre: the "White-Boned Demon," Madame Mao Zedong. On January 25, 1981, Jiang Qing, widow of Mao, was sentenced to death. Two years later, that sentence was changed to life imprisonment.

The daughter of a concubine, Jiang Qing grew up as an outcast in the homes of wealthy men. In her early teens, she joined a troupe of roving actors. By the age of nineteen, she had exhausted two marriages. Reaching Shanghai, she won theatrical success as Ibsen's Nora - a role that gave expression to both her rage and ambition. At twenty-four, Jiang Qing abandoned stardom at the height of a movie career to join Mao Zedong after his Long March across China. She married the great revolutionary, after his current wife was ousted, and rose to be the inspiring and vengeful leader of the Cultural Revolution. As Mao sank toward death, Jiang Qing made her bid to be empress. She failed, and soldiers came to arrest her in the middle of the night. Her downfall reverberated across the world.

Ross Terrill, author of The Life of Mao, one of the West's most eminent Sinologists, is uniquely qualified to unearth Madame Mao's hidden story. Terrill went to China and Taiwan to track down documents and living sources and discovered secret papers and photos that had escaped Madame Mao's confiscation.

In the author's words, "This book tells Jiang Qing’s story through the eloquent, unofficial voices of China: oral histories, eyewitness accounts from the grassroots, testimony of those Chinese who watched, knew, hated, or loved Jiang Qing. . . ."

The result is a portrait of a woman, vivid, flawed, and human, who fought her way to a place in history, as well as a riveting view of one of the most momentous revolutions of all time.

Review: The Kingdom of Women

A forgotten society embracing a matrilineal culture, hidden high in the Tibetan mountains. The title was enough to grab my attention and when the opportunity came to read it, I took it.

Essentially, The Kingdom of Women is a book based upon author Choo Wai Hong's journey of discovery of her ancestral roots and her "spiritual home" among the Mosuo.

So lets begin with a little background: author Choo Wai Hong had a high paying legal career in Singapore, which she gave up to embark upon this journey of self discovery. During her travels in China's Yunnan Province, she comes upon the Mosuo and is intrigued by their culture and customs. She is welcomed into the community and decides that she will lay down her roots here and "go native".

Thus Kingdom of Women is a memoir of Choo's times in the Mosuo community, covering a period of approximately seven years. We are introduced to the particular customs of this female dominant society, all the while lamenting at the adoption of modern Chinese cultural practices by the young Mosuo, and what soon may soon by lost to the mists of time.

The author's style is easy and not overly burdensome with clinical details - and her story comes across as part-memoir, part-travelogue. If you are looking for something more akin to an anthropological study of this fascinating culture, then this is not for you.

Further reading:

The Mosuo Project

The Guardian: Is China's Mosuo tribe the world's last matriarchy?

New York Times: Kingdom of Daughters

Societies of Peace: Matriarchal marriage patterns of the Mosuo people of China

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See

Blurb by Simon & Schuster:

A powerful story about a family, separated by circumstances, culture, and distance, Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little known region and its people and celebrates the bond that connects mothers and daughters.

Review by Virginia Denucci @ Steamboat Today

Growing up in the Ak-ha tribe in the 1980s was not easy for a woman. Li-Yan’s life was immersed in cultural taboos, superstitions, restrictions and curses. When she became pregnant out of wedlock, Li-Yan was forced to abandon her child, leaving her newborn daughter at the door of an orphanage, with no more than a tea cake from her secret, ancient tea trees. 

Several themes were intricately woven into this amazing story. See immerses the reader into the Chinese tea culture, from small village harvesting to a world-wide business. Enter the world of tea connoisseurs, who discuss vintage, harvests, seasons, geographic source, weather and, of course, age, as it relates to taste.

Review by Deborah Donovan @ Book Page:

See’s ambitious novel touches on Chinese cultural history, the centuries-old intricacies of the tea business and both the difficulties and joys of Chinese-American adoptions. But ultimately it’s a novel about the strength of mother-daughter ties—peopled, as is each of See’s novels, with strong characters with whom the reader empathizes from the first page to the last.

Review by Emily Kim @ the Washington Times:

The best-selling author of “Snow Flower and The Secret Fan” and “China Dolls,” Ms. See is known for writing historical fiction about the Chinese female experience. However in her new novel, Ms. See diverges from writing about the Han, China’s ethnic majority. Here, she focuses on a Chinese ethnic minority, the Akha.

Ms. See gradually gives information about the Akha’s culture, not overwhelming the reader with information. However, the beginning is most heavy with rituals, beliefs and taboos that the narrator, Li-yan reveals.

Review by Terry Hong @ Book List Online:

See, herself partly of Chinese ancestry, creates a complex narrative that ambitiously includes China’s political and economic transformation, little-known cultural history, the intricate challenges of transracial adoption, and an insightful overview of the global implications of specialized teas. The only possible flaw is that some may consider her magic-wand ending unbelievable. 

Empress Dowager Cixi

Bel Mooney's review of Jung Chang's "Empress Dowager Cixi" from the Mail Online:

She was a version of Margaret Thatcher, in a different age, an alien culture. From humble origins yet a natural leader, she used a powerful mixture of intelligence and natural charm to get her way, fighting a single-minded path to the top.

Autocratic and determined, she would let few things or people stand in the way of her ambition to change history.

The lady knew how to manipulate men who were weaker - which was most, even in a male-dominated culture. Powerful rivals held no terror for her, and heaven help those who made her their enemy.

Depending on whether you’re a detractor or an admirer, she was ruthless or tough-minded, devious or shrewd, cruel or simply pragmatic according to the standards of the age. Nobody can argue that this stateswoman made a significant mark on history, yet history’s jury is still out.

Was she an innovator or a despot? The answer is almost certainly - both.

Other Links:

Extract of Jung's book as featured on The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10324161/An-extract-from-Wild-Swans-author-Jung-Changs-new-book-Empress-Dowager-Cixi.html

Interview with Jung Chang featured on the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10314619/Jung-Chang-interview-why-Im-still-banned-in-China.html

Article on Cixi featured in the Smithsonian Magazine: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/da-cixi.html

The Red Chamber

"An epic reimagining of the Chinese literary classic, Dream of the Red Chamber, THE RED CHAMBER tells the story of three women in an aristocratic household in 18th-century Beijing.   Daiyu is an impoverished orphan adopted into the household who falls in love with Baoyu, the brilliant, unpredictable heir to the family fortunes.  Despite his love for her, the family betroths Baoyu to his cousin Baochai, who hides her own desires under a dutiful exterior.  Meanwhile, the young matron Xifeng struggles to protect the family from financial ruin, even as her husband spurns her for her inability to bear a child.  Linking the three women’s fate is the jade, a mysterious stone found in Bayou’s mouth at birth, which seems to foretell a strange and extraordinary destiny for him and the entire family."

The Story behind The Red Chamber By Pauline Chen

Although born of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States, as a child I spoke only rudimentary Chinese; my parents were of a generation who believed that teaching children a foreign language would inhibit their ability to learn English. Instead I grew up reading Austen, the Brontes, Tolstoy, and Dickens. At Harvard I studied the Classics, with a special interest in Latin poetry. I came upon Chinese literature later, and quite by accident. A Taiwanese friend showed me an eleventh-century Chinese poem. As she translated it, line by crystalline line, a door opened into an undreamed world of new literary forms, philosophy, and aesthetics.

Fascinated, I began the long journey of learning classical Chinese. It was in graduate school in East Asian Studies that I discovered the canonical Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. The story of brilliant and talented women whose lives were constricted by lack of physical freedom and opportunity (aristocratic Chinese women were confined to Women’s Quarters, where men were allowed only limited access), the novel resonated with my own family’s history: my two grandmothers were both illiterate, and my mother had struggled to gain access to the education her brothers received. More than twenty-five hundred pages long, the book was structured far more loosely than a western novel, linking hundreds of characters and meandering through years of mealtimes and naps, parties and chats. And yet, tracing with exquisite care the inner worlds of characters from princesses to maids, and unearthing the depths of feeling and disparities in power beneath the most everyday interactions, Dream of the Red Chamber more closely mirrored my experience of life than any work I had previously read.

Teaching the novel to undergraduates at Oberlin College, I came to realize how the vast majority of American readers, even if they had known of the book, would be discouraged from reading it by its length and unfamiliarity. I began to write a version for western readers, translating Dream of the Red Chamber not merely into another language but into another form, that of a contemporary western novel. Moreover, Cao’s original ending had been lost, and the final third of the novel as it now exists had been written by another hand after his death. Haunted by a sense of incompletion, I needed to finish the story for myself.

My first drafts succeeded only in being abridgements. I had to allow myself greater freedom to depart from the original plot to distill what I found most compelling about the work: an elegiac awareness of the illusory and evanescent nature of human life; also the excruciating conflict between female friendship and romantic love that occurs when women intimates become rivals for the same man. To these two central themes, I added a question that gripped me as a modern reader and writer: in a culture where women’s opportunities and movements were ruthlessly restricted, in what ways could they shape their own destinies? 

About the Author
Pauline Chen started her career as a lawyer, but was sidetracked by her love of literature. After completing a Ph.D. at Princeton, she moved to Ohio in 1996 to teach Chinese language, film, and literature at Oberlin College. When her son was born in 2000, she quit her job to stay home, writing every morning before the rest of the family awoke. Her first book, Peiling and the Chicken-Fried Christmas, was a novel for children about a Taiwanese-American family in Ohio. THE RED CHAMBER is her first novel for adults.  

For more information on "Dream of the Red Chamber" see also:
Dream of the Red Chamber
Review at A Scribble of Writers