959.6042 UNG 2000

Daughter of the River is a memoir of China unlike any other. Born during the Great Famine of the early 1960s and raised in the slums of Chongqing, Hong Ying was constantly aware of hunger and the sacrifices required to survive. As she neared her eighteenth birthday, she became determined to unravel the secrets that left her an outsider in her own family. At the same time, a history teacher at her school began to awaken her sense of justice and her emerging womanhood. Hong Ying's wrenching coming-of-age would teach her the price of taking a stand and show her the toll of totalitarianism, poverty, and estrangement on her family. With raw intensity and fearless honesty, Daughter of the River follows China's trajectory through one woman's life, from the Great Famine through the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square.

                                                                                                                                              ​ebooks

895.13 HONG

Daughter of the River is a memoir of China unlike any other. Born during the Great Famine of the early 1960s and raised in the slums of Chongqing, Hong Ying was constantly aware of hunger and the sacrifices required to survive. As she neared her eighteenth birthday, she became determined to unravel the secrets that left her an outsider in her own family. At the same time, a history teacher at her school began to awaken her sense of justice and her emerging womanhood. Hong Ying's wrenching coming-of-age would teach her the price of taking a stand and show her the toll of totalitarianism, poverty, and estrangement on her family. With raw intensity and fearless honesty, Daughter of the River follows China's trajectory through one woman's life, from the Great Famine through the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square.

915.138 HESSLER 2001

Like many other small cities in this vast and ever-evolving country, Fuling is shifting gears and heading down a new path, one of change and vitality, tension and reform, disruption and growth. Its position at the crossroads came into sharp focus when [the author] arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. [The author] taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the ways of Fuling - and about the complex process of understanding that takes place when one is immersed in a radically different society. [This book] is [a] portrait of a city that, much like China itself, is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.

952.02 MIYOSHI 1994

In 1860 the empire of Japan sent 170 officials—samurai and bureaucrats, inspectors and spies, half a dozen teenagers and one Confucian physician—to tour the United States, the first such visit to America and the first trip anywhere abroad in two hundred years. Politics and curiosity, on both sides, mixed to create an amazing journey. Using the travelers' own journals of the trip and American accounts of the group's progress, historian and critic Masao Miyoshi relates the fascinating tale of entrenched assumptions, startling impressions, and bewildering conclusions.  Miyoshi finds in this unique encounter an entertaining adventure story of discovery and a paradigm of the attitudes and judgments that have ever since shaped American and Japanese perceptions of one another. This revealing account of "otherness" is still relevant today as we strive to understand peoples whom we think of as foreign—and therefore strangely other than we.

952.03 NIMURA 2016

In 1871, five young girls were sent by the Japanese government to the United States. Their mission: learn Western ways and return to help nurture a new generation of enlightened men to lead Japan. Raised in traditional samurai households during the turmoil of civil war, three of these unusual ambassadors--Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda--grew up as typical American schoolgirls. Upon their arrival in San Francisco they became celebrities, their travels feted by newspapers across the nation. The passionate friendships they formed reveal an intimate world of cross-cultural fascination and connection. Ten years later, they returned to Japan--a land grown foreign to them--determined to revolutionize women's education. Based on in-depth archival research in Japan and in the United States, Daughters of the Samurai is beautifully, cinematically written, a fascinating lens through which to view an extraordinary historical moment

302.39517 VREELAN 1957

 This is a study of Mongolian kinship structure based on interviews with informants living in the United States. Vreeland examines the social, political, economic and religious organization in the home communities of informant's from three Mongolian tribes: the Khalkha in western Mongolia, Chahar in Inner Mongolia, China, and the Dagor along the Nen Jiang (river), which divides Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia, China. Vreeland accounts for their simlarities and differences; similarities in terms of a common ancestral stock and differences in terms of varying influences from the Chinese-Manchu state and Tibetan Buddhism (referred to as Lamaism). Vreeland argues for a common origin of kinship structure and through careful analysis of kinshhip terminology attempts to reconstruct a prototype kinship system and account for subsequent transformations.

301.29593 MULDER 2000

Thailand is often called 'The Land of Smiles', a sobriquet which sounds at once pleasant and mysterious. At the same time that a smile may suggest good humour, it is one of the most enigmatic of expressions as well. A smile may be a sign of kindness, of forgiveness, or friendly inclinations; a smile may also be merely polite, a way to smooth interaction or a sign that one is willing to listen. A smile may indicate agreement, or self-confidence, but may also be a means to gently express one's opposition or doubt. A person on the defensive may smile, and one may smile when sad, or hurt, or even insulted. It has been said that the Thais have a smile for every emotion, and with so many nuances of smiling, the smile often hides more than it reveals. This book aims to look behind smiles and appearances in order to discover those regularities and expectations that pervade everyday life. To that purpose it identifies some of the basic ideas that give meaning and order to existence and make life in Thai society eminently reasonable. 

959.7043 MCKELVE 1999

The Dust of Life is a collection of vivid and devastating oral histories of Vietnamese Amerasians. Abandoned during the war by their American fathers, discriminated against by the victorious Communists, and ignored for many years by the American government, they endured life in impoverished Vietnam. Their stories are sad, sometimes tragic, but they are also testimonials to human resiliency."--BOOK JACKET. "Robert McKelvey is a former marine who served in Vietnam in the late 1960s. Now a child psychiatrist, he returned to Vietnam in 1990 to begin the long series of interviews that resulted in this book