Life

Reading pleasures

By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-01-07 08:31

Whatever the genre you fancy, the English-language book titles of 2011 are sure to delight, Chitralekha Basu says.

Since the New Year is less than a week old, and assuming that your "China-reading" lists for 2011 are still blank sheets, or nearly so, we would like to bring you a selection of what the English-language publishers have lined up. Here's a checklist that, we hope, will have some use for anybody remotely interested in China - be it its past, present or future; people, politics or photographs; writers, revolutions or real estate.

Economy/Politics

Slated for a May release, China, by Henry Kissinger, looks all set to be a landmark publication.

Kissinger, the chief architect of the United States' foreign policy between 1969 and 1977, visited China nine times. He is credited with breaking the ice between China and the United States since the big freeze that crystallized with the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.

Expect to find hitherto-unknown details about Kissinger's trysts with Chinese political giants, Chairman Mao Zedong and former premier Zhou Enlai, and also his views on how China might be impacting the rest of the world in the future.

"It is a rare privilege to publish a book by someone who has not only observed the development of China over the past 40 years, but also played an active part in its opening up," says Jo Lusby, head, Penguin China. "His perspective will inevitably contribute much to Western understanding of this country."

A Chinese statesman's view of the world will be brought to English-speaking readers by HarperCollins in March. Tang Jiaxuan, China's foreign minister from 1998 to 2003, who played a significant role in negotiating bilateral relations with the US, Russia, Japan and the European Union, has written an engaging account of the backstage drama in Tempest and Zephyr.

MacMillan is launching the paperback edition of As China Goes So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers are Transforming Everything, by Karl Gerth.

Praised by The Wall Street Journal Asia as a book that ought to appeal to "readers from executives looking to break into the China market to sociologists keen to understand how consumerism is changing China", Gerth's book is about the pervasive growth of American-style consumer culture in China. "Everyday choices made by ordinary Chinese" might effect a paradigm change in the global economy, it contends.

Aertropolis (MacMillan), by John D Kasarda, due in March, examines the future of urban living, when a giant airport will form the pivot of all activity, a hub connecting workers, suppliers and consumer goods with the global network. Beijing, Amsterdam and Washington DC are already headed this way, the author argues.

History/Philosophy

Shanghai-based Earnshaw Books will release a slew of titles on historical China, including Ghosts of the China Coast by Geoffrey Vincent Summers and Dcadence Mandchoue by Sir Edmund Backhouse. While the first promises to be a history of colonial-era China, buttressed on "the juiciest stories, gossip, intrigues and amusing facts not found in other histories", the second is a first-person account of the lives of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) Manchu royals by sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse.

Backhouse's chronicle turns contemporary historians' understanding of the Manchu era, and its main players, including Empress Dowager Cixi, on its head - only there's no saying if they are true.

Historian Robert Bickers' The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914, (Penguin), is the story of China's encounters with Western colonialists, from the first Opium War to the Boxer Rebellion. Bickers' dramatized retelling of the clash of titans combines "squalor, romance, brutality and exoticism" on a panoramic scale.

Hong Kong University Press will be launching a range of books on slightly esoteric subjects, but not any the less engaging or intriguing than mainstream or popular history.

Ethics in Early China: an Anthology, by Chris Fraser, Dan Robins and Timothy O. Leary, shifts the attention from Confucianism to Moism, a near-defunct school of philosophy based on the idea of universal love and "embodied virtue", tying ethics to physical cultivation.

In The Empress and Mrs Conger, Grant Hayter-Menzies has reconstructed the unlikely association of Empress Dowager Cixi and American diplomat's wife Sarah Conger when their worlds overlapped as Beijing's foreign legation quarters came under siege during the Boxer Rebellion of 1901.

Fiction/Translation

MacMillan will launch the paperback edition of Qiu Xiaolong's Years of Red Dust: Stories of Shanghai. In a series of stories, the creator of the poetry-loving sleuth Inspector Chen, talks about how the momentous developments in Chinese history - the Korean War in the 1950s, the "re-education" of urban youth in the 1960s, the financial boom since the 1990s - brought about dramatic changes in the lives of ordinary Shanghai natives.

Yan Lianke's much-awaited Dream of Ding Village (translated by Cindy Carter) is just out. Often compared to French-Algerian author Albert Camus' classic work, The Plague, Dream of Ding Village is about the social ostracization of people suffering from AIDS, written with ruthless clarity.

Make-Do Publishing will bring out Dancing Through Red Dust, by Murong Xuecun, in English translation. Replete with Murong's trademark cynicism and black humor, the book exposes corruption in legal circles.

"In many ways the book feels like a culmination of what Murong has done in his career so far," says his publisher-translator Harvey Thomlinson. "The novel, whose main character is a wealthy and corrupt lawyer, offers a powerful vision of a legal system where sexual favors are traded for death sentences, and trials are just another method of making money for all involved."

The streak of corruption spills beyond the courtroom, sullying relationships, Thomlinson informs.

Writer of picture and inspirational books, Andrea Alban has ventured into fiction for adults. In February, MacMillan will launch her novel, Anya's War, based on the true story of her Russian Jewish family's finding asylum in 1930s Shanghai and the intriguing circumstances that followed.

Memoir

Alan Paul realized his American dream in China. His somewhat bizarre tale about how a series of unforeseen events launched his career as a rock star in the Middle Kingdom, Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing (HarperCollins), is due in the first quarter of the year.

Marvin Farkas, filmmaker and Broadway star, turned cameraman and foreign correspondent to explore the Far East in the 1950s. Farkas arrived in Hong Kong in 1954 and never went back - plunging headlong into films, crime reporting and supplying documentary footage to international news networks.

In An Eastern Saga (Make-Do Publishing) Farkas recounts his meetings with legendary figures such as former premier Zhou Enlai, even as he re-creates 1950s Hong Kong, "from the high life on the Peak to opium dens in the walled city".

Amy Chua, a professor of law at Yale Law School, tried bringing up her two American-Chinese children in New Haven, Connecticut the Chinese way. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Penguin) is the story of her experiments in parenting, the results of which are as disastrous as they are hilarious.

Art

For art connoisseurs, Hong Kong University Press is bringing out a fine selection of well-mounted titles. Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China, edited by Jeffrey W Cody and Francis Terpak, features works by unknown photographers from the 1840s, showing how Chinese artists grafted their own brushwork on photographed images.

A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary China: Critical Voices in Art and Aesthetics, edited by Jorg Huber and Zhao Chuan, looks closely at the decline of Western influence in Chinese art and a return to workaday realities, besides how the traditional Chinese forms have persisted, despite being systematically eliminated at times.

The second volume featuring the works of China's legendary cartoonist, Sapajou II: The Golden Years, edited by Derek Sandhaus, is on its way.

Dedicated to preserving the words and images from early 20th-century China, this is Earnshaw's tribute to the genius of an artist and the flavors of 1930s Shanghai, when both the city and the man who made it his subject, truly blossomed.