The Land South of the Clouds
The Land South of the Clouds

Author: Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith

Publisher: University of Louisiana

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781935754800

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"It is the summer of 1979, the year everyone anticipates the long awaited release of Apocalypse Now, America's frustration with inflation and the long lines to the gas pumps; the top story on every news channel is President Jimmy Carter and his administration's grim dilemma in trying to rescue the American hostages in Iran, and our 10-year-old narrator, Long Vanh, is burdened with the secret his mother, Vu-An, entrusted him to keep: not to tell anyone of her desire to return to Vietnam to be with her father who is serving hard labor in a reeducation camp. Because Long Vanh is a con lai--half Vietnamese, half black--he believes he can become the obedient son despite his shortcomings of not knowing how to decipher the accent marks adorning the words in the letters she receives from the old country, his inability to speak the language, or even maneuver chopsticks properly. He believes if he can compensate for his flaws, she will want to stay in "Asia Minor", an enclave of Los Angeles comprised of veterans and their foreign war wives. She will stay in America to keep the family intact and forget that she ever packed her Samsonite with ao dais, letters, and photographs she made him store in his closet, make her forget that she ever taught him how to lie to anyone who phones that she doesn't live here anymore, that he can even tell them that she is dead. The Land South of the Clouds serves as the companion piece to The Land Baron's Sun: The Story of Lý Loc and His Seven Wives. It is the story of immigrant families meshing into the fabric of American culture, their memories of the old country weighing on their conscience and the repercussions they feel even from thousands of miles away on another continent, in another world, another life"--

South of the Clouds
South of the Clouds

Author: Bill Porter

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2015-11-10

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1619027194

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While flipping through the atlas of Chang Ch'i–yun, one of China's most famous geographers, distinguished translator Bill Porter (Red Pine) developed a curiosity about the southwestern province of China. Dubbed Yun–nan, "South of the Clouds," this was the last area modern China to come under Chinese control. Originally conquered by the Mongols and eventually introduced to foreigners as a vibrant setting for trade, Yun–nan became a critical crossroad connecting East and West. In 1992, Porter left his home in Hong Kong to tour the small towns and major cities of Yun–nan, studying each of their local cultures and larger impacts on the trajectory of Chinese history. Here, he shares his encyclopedic knowledge of the nation's beautiful legacy while introducing new insight about the province's landscapes, people, and recent state of affairs. He visited Bulang Mountain, where the local people had no written language of their own, so they sent their children to live as monks in nearby Tai temples to learn Tai script. He saw women in Lijiang who wore traditional sheepskin jackets that bore seven frogeyes without clear explanation. In Dali, a small town turned urban center, he recalls a massive museum built to show off the city's new wealth, only to have half of its halls left empty and unvisited. The first of a series of three China travel memoirs to be published by Soft Skull, Bill Porter's book tells the incredible story of a spread of land with a thousand years of human history. His remarkable insight and unparalleled understanding of China place this book at the forefront of East Asian travel literature.

Cooking South of the Clouds
Cooking South of the Clouds

Author: Georgia Freedman

Publisher: Kyle Books

Published: 2018-09-06

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0857835637

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Twenty-four of the country's minority groups call Yunnan home, each retaining their own traditions. Stretching from the Himalayan plateau down to the subtropics, Yunnan encompasses extremes from alpine meadows to rainforest. It is the most diverse region in China culturally, biologically, and meteorologically. On a culinary level, this means Yunnan is one of the most delicious places on earth. The region is famous for its mushrooms, hams, pickles, edible flowers, its use of potatoes, and its love of chillies and Sichuan peppercorns. Yunnan's food is exciting and unfamiliar, but much of it is actually quite easy to make, using simple techniques already familiar to Western cooks. Each chapter covers a different area featuring its cardinal recipes such as Tibetan momo dumplings, Dai cucumber salad with peanuts, the famed "crossingthe- bridge" noodles of Kunming, Eastern-style fried rice with ham, potatoes, and peas, and roasted eggplant salad from near the Burmese border. Complete with profiles of local cooks, artisans, and farmers, as well as breathtaking on-location photography, Cooking South of the Clouds takes readers on an unforgettable journey through the land of Shangri-La and introduces a new world of flavours.

Washing Our Hands in the Clouds
Washing Our Hands in the Clouds

Author: Bo Petersen

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2015-08-11

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1611175526

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In Washing Our Hands in the Clouds, Bo Petersen masterfully crafts a reflection on the Civil War, emancipation, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement in the personal story of how it affected one man's life in a specific South Carolina locale. Petersen's accomplishment is that, in studying the Pee Dee region of Dillon and Marion Counties, he illuminates those issues throughout the Deep South. Through conversations with Joe Williams, his family, and acquaintances, white and black, Petersen merges the Williams family history back to Joe's great-great-grandfather, Scipio Williams, with the lives and fortunes of four generations of South Carolinians—black and white. Scipio, the family progenitor, was a man free in spirit and action before the Civil War destroyed chattel slavery. Scipio was a free black farmer who worked land that he owned in the Pee Dee before and after the war and during the worst days of Jim Crow white supremacy. Petersen uses the Williams family genealogy, neighborhood, and, most important, their farmlands to understand Pee Dee and South Carolina history from the 1860s to the present. In his research he discovers historical currents that run deeper than events—currents of agriculture, land ownership, and allegiance to native soil—and transcend the march of time and carry the Williams family through slavery, war, Jim Crow, and economic dislocation to today's stories of Joe Williams. In gathering what Petersen describes as a collection of front porch stories, he also writes a history of what matters most to this family and this locale. The resulting narrative is surprising, unconventional, and true for all families in all places. In Dillon County, tobacco production followed cotton farming. Old-time logging coexisted with textile factories. Jim Crow gave way to uncertain prospects of racial harmony. Those were monumental changes of circumstance, but they did not change human character. Washing Our Hands in the Clouds is a history of human character, of life that endures outside of the restraints of time. To understand this phenomenon is to realize that both Scipio and Joe and the generations between them wash their hands in the timeless clouds of South Carolina's sky.

South of the Clouds
South of the Clouds

Author: Lucien Miller

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2016-06-01

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 0295807008

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The tales included here represent all of Yunnan Province’s officially designated ethnic minorities, and include creation myths, romances, historical legends, tales explaining natural phenomena, ghost stories, and festival tales. The tales are peopled by memorable characters, such as the Tibetan mother who, reborn as a cow, comforts and helps her daughter into her harsh life as a slave girl; the two Kucong sisters who marry snakes; and the bodiless Lahu “head-baby” who grows up to win one of the earth-god Poyana’s daughters in marriage. Chosen for their representativeness, aesthetic appeal, and variety, the stories provide rich examples of the folk traditions of Southwest China. South of the Clouds includes introductions and an appendix which describe the places and people of Yunnan, analyzethe literary and psychological characteristics of their stories, give the sources of the tales, and explain the methodolgy of collecting folk literature in China.

South of the Clouds
South of the Clouds

Author: Seth Faison

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1429973684

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South of the Clouds offers a fascinating, intimate portrait of China by telling the story of an American man who ventures into its hidden realms---romance, politics, the criminal underworld, and Tibet. As he matures from a wide-eyed student into a journalist and a seasoned observer, he develops a passion for uncovering secrets, about China and about himself. The author navigates his way past forbidding walls to peek inside the dark corners of Chinese society, relying on a remarkable collection of friends and acquaintances who help guide the way: an embittered policeman in Xian, a gay professor in Shanghai, and a Buddhist monk in Tibet, who presides at an ancient burial ritual where the corpse is carved up and fed to wild vultures. The Tiananmen Square massacre, people smuggling, and the Falun Gong movement are among the political and social upheavals that the author explains as he witnesses China's uncertain road toward capitalism and its place in the modern world. Along his travels, the author wrestles with his own cultural identity, his sexuality, and his spiritual bearings. He finds an erotic outlet in the Chinese "Sauna Massage" and a stirring emotional connection with Jin Xing, a brilliant choreographer and China's first openly transsexual citizen. Ultimately, he discovers the answer to lifelong questions on a mountaintop in Tibet. Seth Faison, with a subtle understanding of Chinese culture, brings past and present events to life in a thought-provoking account of this mysterious nation and its people.

Our House in the Clouds
Our House in the Clouds

Author: Judy Blankenship

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2013-03-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0292745273

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While many baby boomers are downsizing to a simpler retirement lifestyle, photographer and writer Judy Blankenship and her husband Michael Jenkins took a more challenging leap in deciding to build a house on the side of a mountain in southern Ecuador. They now live half the year in Cañar, an indigenous community they came to know in the early nineties when Blankenship taught photography there. They are the only extranjeros (outsiders) in this homely, chilly town at 10,100 feet, where every afternoon a spectacular mass of clouds rolls up from the river valley below and envelopes the town. In this absorbing memoir, Blankenship tells the interwoven stories of building their house in the clouds and strengthening their ties to the community. Although she and Michael had spent considerable time in Cañar before deciding to move there, they still had much to learn about local customs as they navigated the process of building a house with traditional materials using a local architect and craftspeople. Likewise, fulfilling their obligations as neighbors in a community based on reciprocity presented its own challenges and rewards. Blankenship writes vividly of the rituals of births, baptisms, marriages, festival days, and deaths that counterpoint her and Michael’s solitary pursuits of reading, writing, listening to opera, playing chess, and cooking. Their story will appeal to anyone contemplating a second life, as well as those seeking a deeper understanding of daily life in the developing world.

Cloud Cuckoo Land
Cloud Cuckoo Land

Author: Anthony Doerr

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-09-28

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 1982168455

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On the New York Times bestseller list for over 20 weeks * A New York Times Notable Book * A National Book Award Finalist * Named a Best Book of the Year by Fresh Air, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Associated Press, and many more “If you’re looking for a superb novel, look no further.” —The Washington Post From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, comes the instant New York Times bestseller that is a “wildly inventive, a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences” (The New York Times Book Review). Among the most celebrated and beloved novels of recent times, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope, and a book. In the 15th century, an orphan named Anna lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople. She learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds what might be the last copy of a centuries-old book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the army that will lay siege to the city. His path and Anna’s will cross. In the present day, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno rehearses children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno, and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders whose lives are gloriously intertwined. Doerr’s dazzling imagination transports us to worlds so dramatic and immersive that we forget, for a time, our own.

Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown
Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown

Author:

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010-05-19

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0231520980

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Compiled by a leading scholar of Chinese poetry, Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown is the first collection of Chan (Zen) poems to be situated within Chan thought and practice. Combined with exquisite paintings by Charles Chu, the anthology compellingly captures the ideological and literary nuances of works that were composed, paradoxically, to "say more by saying less," and creates an unparalleled experience for readers of all backgrounds. Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown includes verse composed by monk-poets of the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. Their style ranges from the direct vernacular to the evocative and imagistic. Egan's faithful and elegant translations of poems by Han Shan, Guanxiu, and Qiji, among many others, do justice to their perceptions and insights, and his detailed notes and analyses unravel centuries of Chan metaphor and allusion. In these gems, monk-poets join mainstream ideas on poetic function to religious reflection and proselytizing, carving out a distinct genre that came to influence generations of poets, critics, and writers. The simplicity of Chan poetry belies its complex ideology and sophisticated language, elements Egan vividly explicates in his religious and literary critique. His interpretive strategies enable a richer understanding of Mahayana Buddhism, Chan philosophy, and the principles of Chinese poetry.

The Land Beyond the Clouds
The Land Beyond the Clouds

Author: Sarah Stewart

Publisher: FriesenPress

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1525537032

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Meet Gudrid, a Viking girl, just 15 years old, but she already knows what she wants. That doesn’t include staying home and weaving sails day after day for her father’s boat. The sea is in her blood and she dreams of sailing to a distant land where none of her people have ever set foot. Her foster mother has taught her all the healing ways and the ancient magic of her Viking people. Gudrid can see the future, heal disease, and speak with spirits, but is powerless until she can be more than just the Chief’s daughter. She wants to make her own choices and live her own life. Explore Gudrid’s world as she battles for her own sense of self, her survival at the edge of the world and her discovery of love and love’s many faces as we voyage with her. Sail through the storm to the new found land in the year 1000AD with Gudrid and her people. Their compelling story of desire, sorrow, terror and love with a cast of unforgettable characters will intrigue, disturb and draw you deeply into the Viking world.