Chinese Studies

Sea of Poppies, a novel by Amitav Ghosh published in 2008, tells the intertwining stories of several people who find themselves aboard the Ibis, a former slave ship, in the early 19th century. The principal characters are aboard the ship under varying and more and less desirable circumstances, and employing varying levels of deception. The novel takes place shortly before the First Opium War, and its major themes are of imperialism and colonialism under a... Read Sea of Poppies Summary

See You in the Cosmos, a 2017 middle-grade contemporary novel by Jack Cheng, features 11-year-old Alex Petroski as its main character and narrator. Inspired by scientist Carl Sagan, Alex wants to use a hand-built rocket to send audio recordings about life on Earth to extraterrestrial creatures. Though his quest to communicate with alien life fails, Alex finds himself on a much larger journey toward self-identity and truth. The novel is a Golden Kite Award Winner... Read See You in the Cosmos Summary

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Shanghai Girls (May 2009) is a New York Times bestselling historical novel by Lisa See. It is the first of a two-book series that concludes with Dreams of Joy (2011). The author’s paternal great-grandfather emigrated from China, and many of See’s books examine the Chinese immigrant experience in America. Other titles that cover similar subject matter are Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), China Dolls (2014), The Tea Girl of... Read Shanghai Girls Summary

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a frame tale, a story within a story, as told by an eighty-year-old Chinese woman, reflecting on her life and preparing for her death. In the first and last chapter, the narrator Lily reveals that she is dictating the story to Peony, the wife of her grandson, as a form of confession to her friend Snow Flower who is now in the afterworld. Lily was born to a... Read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Summary

Son of the Revolution (1983), written by Liang Heng with his wife, Judith Shapiro, is a memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and is both the story of Liang’s own coming-of-age and a chronicle of China’s political and cultural upheaval following the Communist Party’s rise to power in the mid-1900s.Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain references to violence and death by suicide.Liang Heng is born in Changsha, a large city in central... Read Son of the Revolution Summary

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Stories of Your Life and Others is a collection of short stories published in 2002 by the American science fiction and fantasy writer Ted Chiang. The book contains eight stories that belong to science fiction, science fantasy, alternative history, and magic realism genres. Seven of the eight stories appeared in previous publications. In the stories, Chiang explores concepts including the ethics of science, the benefits and dangers of intelligence, and cultural differences in alternate realities... Read Stories of Your Life and Others Summary

Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans is a 1989 book by American historian Ronald Takaki. Takaki analyzes the long and diverse history of Asians in America, explaining the personal and economic circumstances that prompted their immigration, and recounting their myriad experiences in their new country. Takaki argues that, traditionally, historians’ Eurocentric histories have neglected to analyze and explain Asian Americans’ role in American history. This has led to a distorted perception... Read Strangers from a Different Shore Summary

The Tao Te Ching is a guide to the philosophy of Taoism and commonly credited to 6th-century BCE Chinese philosopher and writer Lao Tzu, though some portions of the text date back to the late 4th century. Taoism was a school of thought and method for survival in turbulent times, and its eighty-one short books explain what the Tao (roughly translated as “the way”) consists of.The Tao Te Ching begins with the idea that the... Read Tao Te Ching Summary

The Art of War, written in China during the fifth century BCE by military expert Sun Tzu, has been favored reading among soldiers and strategists for two millennia. Its concise 13 chapters, studied to this day by world leaders and generals from Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong to US Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell, teach victory through studying the opponent, building impregnable defenses, confusing the enemy with diversions, and attacking forcefully its weak spots. The book... Read The Art of War Summary

The Bridegroom (2000) is a short story collection by Ha Jin. The stories touch on themes involving Chinese social life, the intersection of Chinese and American cultural and economic customs, and authority and the individual. The Bridegroom is Ha Jin’s third short story collection, and first following the success of his 1999 novel, Waiting. Each of the stories in The Bridegroom previously appeared in journals, such as Harper’s and The Boston Book Review.Other works by... Read The Bridegroom Summary

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The Death of Woman Wang by Jonathan Spence is a nonfiction history focusing on four crises in 17th-century rural China: problems with tax collection; a widow struggling to protect her child and inheritance from her husband’s relatives; a bloody feud; and the attempt of a woman named Wang to leave her husband.It is from the last topic that the book takes its title. Although Spence does not use the term himself, The Death of Woman... Read The Death of Woman Wang Summary

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The Fortunes (2016) is a historical novel by British author Peter Ho Davies. Written in the form of four interconnected stories, it details the experiences of various groups of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the United States. Three of the four stories are based on real, historical figures, and together the narratives form a vast, multi-generational portrait of Chinese American communities across time and in various regions of the US. The four stories take... Read The Fortunes Summary

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A measure of the quality, prescience, and veracity of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth is that, nearly a century after its first publication, the book remains required reading in literature, world history, and social science courses. The novel is a simple, straightforward narrative about 50 years in the life of Wang Lung, an uneducated farmer in eastern China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While this era period was one of continual... Read The Good Earth Summary

The Jade Peony is a 1995 novel by Wayson Choy. The book is divided into three parts, each with a distinct narrator. Each narrator is a child belonging to a Chinese-Canadian family; the novel is set during the escalation of World War II. The book follows each of these characters in a fully developed plot arc. Together, the parts form a tapestry that provides the reader with an incisive and insightful emotional, historical, and sociological... Read The Jade Peony Summary

The Journey to the West: Volume I (1983), translated and edited by Anthony C. Yu, contains the first 25 chapters of a 100-chapter hero’s epic, an allegory designed to impart knowledge on how to behave and what values to extol. Originally published in the late 16th century during the late Ming Dynasty, this epic is “loosely based on the famous pilgrimage of Xuanzang…the monk who went from China to India in quest of Buddhist scriptures”... Read Journey to the West: Volume I Summary