Chinese characters : profiles of fast-changing lives in a fast-changing land / edited by Angilee Shah and Jeffrey Wasserstrom ; foreword by Pankaj Mishra.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Shah, Angilee.

Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National characteristics, Chinese.

China--Social life and customs.

China.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (247 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

An artist paints landscapes of faraway places that she cannot identify in order to find her place in the global economy. A migrant worker sorts recyclables and thinks deeply about the soul of his country, while a Taoist mystic struggles to keep his traditions alive. An entrepreneur capitalizes on a growing car culture by trying to convince people not to buy cars. And a 90-year-old woman remembers how the oldest neighborhoods of her city used to be. These are the exciting and saddening, humorous and confusing stories of utterly ordinary people who are living through China's extraordinary transformations. The immense variety in the lives of these Chinese characters dispels any lingering sense that China has a monolithic population or is just a place where dissidents fight Communist Party loyalists and laborers create goods for millionaires.Chinese Characters is a collection, as Pankaj Mishra writes in his foreword, ";to herald a new golden age of journalism about a ceaselessly fascinating country."; Contributors include a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a Macarthur Fellow, the China correspondent to a major Indian newspaper, and scholars whose depth of understanding is matched only by the humanity with which they treat their subjects. Their stories together create a multi-faceted portrait of a country in motion and an introduction to some of the best writing on China today.With contributions from: Alec Ash, James Carter, Leslie T. Chang, Xujun Eberlein, Harriet Evans, Anna Greenspan, Peter Hessler, Ian Johnson, Ananth Krishnan, Christina Larson, Michelle Dammon Loyalka, James Millward, Evan Osnos, Jeffrey Prescott, Megan Shank

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction. "Who Are You This Time?"

Chapter 1. The North Peak

Chapter 2. The New Generation's Neocon Nationalists

Chapter 3. Out of Tibet

Chapter 4. Belonging to Old Beijing

Chapter 5. Another Swimmer

Chapter 6. Looking for Lok To

Chapter 7. The Ever-Floating Floater

Chapter 8 King of the Road

Chapter 9. Painting the Outside World

Chapter 10. The Road to a Better Life

Chapter 11. Yong Yang's Odyssey

Chapter 12. The Court Jester

Chapter 13. The Great Wall of Education

Chapter 14. Gilded Age, Gilded Cage

Chapter 15 Shredding for the Motherland

Afterword

Notes and Readings

Contributors

Credits

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9786613855701

9781283543255

1283543257

9780520954137

0520954130

OCLC:

809771519