Much like the fencer who must constantly read and respond to her opponent's tactics during a fencing bout, this debut collection by Mary Jean Chan deftly examines relationships at once conflictual and tender.Flèche (the French word for 'arrow') is an offensive technique commonly used in épée, a competitive sport of the poet's teenage and young adult years. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flèche') in public and private spaces. Themes of multilingualism, queerness, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis and cultural history emerge by means of an imagined personal, maternal and national biography, spoken by a polyphony of female voices. The result is a series of poems that are urgent and hard-hitting as Chan keeps her readers on their toes, dazzling and devastating them by turn.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA POETRY AWARD POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION Flèche (the French word for 'arrow') is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan's young adult years, when she competed locally and internationally for her home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flèche'), and evokes the difficulties of reconciling one's need for safety alongside the desire to shed one's protective armour in order to fully embrace the world. Central to the collection is the figure of the poet's mother, whose fragmented memories of political turmoil in twentieth-century China are sensitively threaded through the book in an eight-part poetic sequence, combined with recollections from Chan's childhood. As complex themes of multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis and cultural history emerge, so too does a richly imagined personal, maternal and national biography. The result is a series of poems that feel urgent and true, dazzling and devastating by turns.
Mao Zedong, leader of the revolution and absolute chairman of the People's Republic of China, was also a calligrapher and a poet of extraordinary grace and eloquent simplicity. The poems in this beautiful edition (from the 1963 Beijing edition), translated and introduced by Willis Barnstone, are expressions of decades of struggle, the painful loss of his first wife, his hope for a new China, and his ultimate victory over the Nationalist forces. Willis Barnstone's introduction, his short biography of Mao and brief history of the revolution, and his notes on Chinese versification all combine to enrich the Western reader's understanding of Mao's poetry.
An exploration of the burgeoning field of Anglophone Asian diaspora poetry, this book draws on the thematic concerns of Hong Kong, Asian-American and British Asian poets from the wider Chinese or East Asian diasporic culture to offer a transnational understanding of the complex notions of home, displacement and race in a globalised world. Located within current discourse surrounding Asian poetry, postcolonial and migrant writing, and bridging the fields of literary and cultural criticism with author interviews, this book provides close readings on established and emerging Chinese diasporic poets' work by incorporating the writers' own reflections on their craft through interviews with some of those featured. In doing so, Jennifer Wong explores the usefulness and limitations of existing labels and categories in reading the works of selected poets from specific racial, socio-cultural, linguistic environments and gender backgrounds, including Bei Dao, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe, Nina Mingya Powles and Mary Jean Chan. Incorporating scholarship from both the East and the West, Wong demonstrates how these poets' experimentation with poetic language and forms serve to challenge the changing notions of homeland, family, history and identity, offering new evaluations of contemporary diasporic voices.
This unusual and interesting book is a fascinating account of the world of Chinese writing. It examines Chinese space and the political and social use of writing as propaganda, a publicity booster and as a ladder for social climbing.
Explores the interplay of politics and the art of writing in China today to explain the complex relationship between tradition and modernity in Chinese culture.
In May of 1985, an international symposium was held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in honor of John M. Crawford, Jr., whose gifts of Chinese calligraphy and painting have constituted a significant addition to the Museum's holdings. Over a three-day period, senior scholars from China, Japan, Taiwan, Europe, and the United States expressed a wide range of perspectives on an issue central to the history of Chinese visual aesthetics: the relationships between poetry, calligraphy, and painting. The practice of integrating the three art forms-known as san-chiieh, or the three perfections-in one work of art emerged during the Sung and Yuan dynasties largely in the context of literati culture, and it has stimulated lively critical discussion ever since. This publication contains twenty-three essays based on the papers presented at the Crawford symposium. Grouped by subject matter in a roughly chronological order, these essays reflect research on topics spanning two millennia of Chinese history. The result is an interdisciplinary exploration of the complex set of relationships between words and images by art historians, literary historians, and scholars of calligraphy. Their findings provide us with a new level of understanding of this rich and complicated subject and suggest further directions for the study of Chinese art history. The essays are accompanied by 255 illustrations, some of which reproduce works rarely published. Chinese characters have been provided throughout the text for artists names, terms, titles of works of art and literature, and important historical figures, as well as for excerpts of selected poetry and prose. A chronology, also containing Chinese characters, and an extensive index contribute to making this book illuminating and invaluable to both the specialist and the layman.
The work covers three major areas: 1) descriptions of Chinese characters and their components, including stroke types, layout patterns, and indications of sound and meaning; 2) basic brush techniques; and 3) the social, cultural, historical, and philosophical underpinnings of Chinese calligraphy---all of which are crucial to understanding and appreciating this art form. --
Kai and his mother were sitting on an Air China 747 in San Francisco International Airport, waiting impatiently for take-off. Kai's father had passed away a year before in the spring of 1988. He was taking his mother home to visit his elder brother in China. The take-off had been delayed because one of the Chinese passengers failed to show up even though he had already checked his luggage. He had decided to remain in the US illegally. This incident took Kai back in time to his own painful and courageous decisions. . A 12 year old Kai was sitting on the train waiting to leave Beijing for Manchuria. Young Kai was confused about why he was leaving, not knowing he and his brothers were being forced to join their exiled parents in the small city of Tonghua. He had spent the past five years with an abusive grandmother and Big Brother in Beijing. Life in Tonghua wasn't any easier for Kai who grew into a teenager with a different accent and a unique physical appearance - 6'7" by the age 15. But the most mind-boggling torment for Kai and his family was still to come. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution began. With half of his relatives in Taiwan, Kai and his family endured political persecution and discrimination. He and his brothers were again forced to leave the city to go to the countryside. Kai set out to overcome these obstacles. He used his basketball skills to land a job in a Liuhe grain depot while playing for the depot's team. Soon after, with China's return to professional sports, two basketball coaches from the National Sports and Athletics Commission recruited him for the National Basketball Team's training camp in Beijing. At the camp, Kai met his best friend Xiao, a track team member, who was later expelled because his father had worked for Kuomintang's army. Kai remained a little longer and then was also expelled for the similar reason. Determined not to return to the isolation of the small town factory, he escaped to Canton. He was caught and then forced back to Beijing, placed in solitary confinement and put under investigation. The authorities suspected him of trying to defect to Hong Kong. Little do they understand, his goal was not to escape the country, but to escape the shackles of the Big Family, that undefined "everyone" that represents generations of tradition. He was nevertheless escorted back to the Liuhe grain depot. After yet another attempt to escape, Kai was drafted by the Shenyang army team and sent to a combat unit for reeducati
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.
