Aching to expand from a couple to a family, Jeff Gammage—a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer—and his wife, Christine, embarked upon a journey that would carry them across a shifting landscape of emotion and through miles of red tape and bureaucratic protocol. On the other side of the world—in the smog-choked city of Changsha in Hunan Province—a silent, stoic little girl was waiting for them: Jin Yu, their new daughter. Now they would have to learn how to fully embrace a life altered beyond recognition by new concerns and responsibilities—and by a love unlike any they'd ever felt before. Alive with insight and feeling, China Ghosts is an eye-opening depiction of the foreign adoption process and a remarkable glimpse into a different culture. Most important, it is a poignant, heartfelt, and intensely intimate chronicle of the making of a family.
The lives of Vic Woods and Ruth Wolfe, working-class teenagers from Liverpool and London, are profoundly disrupted by the arrival of World War II. Ruth’s journey leads her to aerial photographic interpretation, though her aspirations for advancement are denied, while Vic’s wartime experiences with bomber command haunt him long after the war is over. Their post-war marriage and tumultuous relationship with their son, James, make for a gripping narrative of trauma, conflict and, ultimately, love. Set against the backdrop of World War II and the social upheaval of the late 1960s, Hungry Ghosts transports readers into the drama of two pivotal eras in history, exploring the intergenerational impact of war, particularly on the intricate relationships between fathers and sons. Hungry Ghosts is not just a war story; it’s a timeless exploration of family bonds and the indelible scars left by war.
The present book by Hu Baozhu explores the subject of ghosts and spirits and attempts to map the religious landscape of ancient China. The main focus of attention is the character gui 鬼, an essential key to the understanding of spiritual beings. The author analyses the character gui in various materials – lexicons and dictionaries, excavated manuscripts and inscriptions, and received classical texts. Gui is examined from the perspective of its linguistic root, literary interpretation, ritual practices, sociopolitical implication, and cosmological thinking. In the gradual process of coming to know the otherworld in terms of ghosts and spirits, Chinese people in ancient times attempted to identify and classify these spiritual entities. In their philosophical thinking, they connected the subject of gui with the movement of the universe. Thus the belief in ghosts and spirits in ancient China appeared to be a moral standard for all, not only providing a room for individual religiosity but also implementing the purpose of family-oriented social order, the legitimization of political operations, and the understanding of the way of Heaven and Earth.
Shawn C. Smallman and Kimberley Brown's popular introductory textbook for undergraduates in international and global studies is now released in a substantially revised and updated third edition. Encompassing the latest scholarship in what has become a markedly interdisciplinary endeavor and an increasingly chosen undergraduate major, the book introduces key concepts, themes, and issues and then examines each in lively chapters on essential topics, including the history of globalization; economic, political, and cultural globalization; security, energy, and development; health; agriculture and food; and the environment. Within these topics the authors explore such diverse and pressing subjects as commodity chains, labor (including present-day slavery), pandemics, human rights, and multinational corporations and the connections among them. This textbook, used successfully in both traditional and online courses, provides the newest and most crucial information needed for understanding our rapidly changing world. New to this edition: *Close to 50% new material *New illustrations, maps, and tables *New and expanded emphases on political and economic globalization and populism; health; climate change, and development *Extensively revised exercises and activities *New resume-writing exercise in careers chapter *Thoroughly revised online teacher's manual
Guangdong -- Gold Mountain -- Central Pacific -- Foothills -- The High Sierra -- The Summit -- The Strike -- Truckee -- The Golden Spike -- Beyond Promontory.
I think that my best apology for the insignificant size of this volume is the very character of the material composing it. In preparing the legends I sought especially for "weird beauty"; and I could not forget this striking observation in Sir Walter Scott's "Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad" "The supernatural, though appealing to certain powerful emotions very widely and deeply sown amongst the human race, is, nevertheless, a "spring which is peculiarly apt to lose its elasticity by being too much pressed upon."" -- Lafcadio Hearn
Resisting Spirits is a reconsideration of the significance and periodization of literary production in the high socialist era, roughly 1953 through 1966, specifically focused on Mao-era culture workers’ experiments with ghosts and ghost plays. Maggie Greene combines rare manuscript materials—such as theatre troupes’ annotated practice scripts—with archival documents, memoirs, newspapers, and films to track key debates over the direction of socialist aesthetics. Through arguments over the role of ghosts in literature, Greene illuminates the ways in which culture workers were able to make space for aesthetic innovation and contestation both despite and because of the constantly shifting political demands of the Mao era. Ghosts were caught up in the broader discourse of superstition, modernization, and China’s social and cultural future. Yet, as Greene demonstrates, the ramifications of those concerns as manifested in the actual craft of writing and performing plays led to further debates in the realm of literature itself: If we remove the ghost from a ghost play, does it remain a ghost play? Does it lose its artistic value, its didactic value, or both? At the heart of Greene’s intervention is “just reading”: the book regards literature first as literature, rather than searching immediately for its political subtext, and the voices of dramatists themselves finally upstage those of Mao’s inner circle. Ironically, this surface reading reveals layers of history that scholars of the Mao era have often ignored, including the ways in which social relations and artistic commitments continued to inform the world of art. Resisting Spirits thus illuminates the origins of more famous literary inquisitions, showing how the arguments surrounding ghost plays and the fates of their authors place the origins of the Cultural Revolution several years earlier, with a radical new shift in the discourse of theatre.
Annotation. Contemporary Chinese history from the Great Leap Famine of the 1950s to the 1990s is traced in this text. This era saw great changes in the way that communities were run, including the reintroduction of the headman-ship system.
