Farrel Ivins may be standing on the gallows with his neck in a noose, but he's not worried. He's taken a drug that makes it impossible to contemplate his future, and besides, he hasn't given his "final" speech yet. He knows that when the governor hears about the odd goings-on in Oxford Circus, Lake City, Chicago, and Chinatown Crescent, where the tong of the Lean Grey Rats rules, Farrel is bound to be saved. So begins the most Oriental of Harry Stephen Keeler's webwork mysteries.
Joseph Fairweather languishes in a mental institution because he has a theory about time and space that’s just plain crazy. Across the ocean in an abandoned warehouse by the River Thames, Eadgyth Whitchurch lies bound hand and foot, soon to be thrown into the river by the London branch of the Tong of the Lean Grey Rats That Swarm the World, just because she overheard a phone conversation she shouldn’t have. Meanwhile, back in the States there’s a slab of ancient stone that seems to disappear and reappear according to some laws of nature we know nothing about. What’s going on here?
Thanks to the successes of directors and actors like John Woo, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun-Fat, the cinema of Hong Kong is wildly popular worldwide, and there is much more to this diverse film culture than most Western audiences realize. Beyond martial arts and comedy, Hong Kong films are a celebration of the grand diversity and pageantry of moviemaking--covering action, comedy, horror, eroticism, mythology, historical drama, modern romances, and experimental films. Information on 1,100 films produced in British Hong Kong from 1977 to 1997 is included here.
Wing Chun is one of the most popular martial arts in the world. It was made famous by Bruce Lee and his master, Yip Man. The most practiced form of Wing Chun is the Hong Kong version, which is streamlined and compact. However, older systems survive in China and one of them is the obscure art known as Fut Sao (Buddha Hand) Wing Chun. Fut Sao Wing Chun was brought to America in 1961 by Grandmaster Henry Leung, (Hong Lei, Chi Man), who learned the whole system under Great Master Gao Jhi Fut Sao. The system was passed down in America to Master Leung's one disciple, Sifu James Cama. In this book Cama sets out, for the first time, the outline of the Fut Sao system of Wing Chun Kuen.This book is special because, for the first time ever, the Fut Sao Siu Lin Tao and its two-man set are revealed. The Hei Gung set and meditation visualization practice are also detailed. The gem of the art is its internal practices which are rarely seen in Wing Chun. Chapters included: forms training, weapons, training enhancement devices, sensitivity training and internal training.
The Encyclopedia covers the genre from 1920 to 1994. The genre, however, can be very confusing: films often have several titles, and many of the stars have more than one pseudonym. In an effort to clarify some of the confusion, the authors have included all the information available to them on almost 3,300 films. Each entry includes a listing of the production company, the cast and crew, distributors, running times, reviews with star ratings whenever possible, and alternate film titles. A list of film series and one of the stars' pseudonyms, in addition to a 7,900 name index, are also included. Illustrated.
In the last two decades, China has become a dramatically more urban society and hundreds of millions of people have changed residence in the process. Family and communal bonds have been broken in a country once known as "a society of kith and kin." There has been a pervasive sense of moral crisis in contemporary China, and the new market economy doesn't seem to offer any solutions. This book investigates how the Chinese have coped with the condition of modernity in which strangers are routinely thrust together. Haiyan Lee dismisses the easy answers claiming that this "moral crisis" is merely smoke and mirrors conjured up by paternalistic, overwrought leaders and scholars, or that it can be simply chalked up to the topsy-turvy of a market economy on steroids. Rather, Lee argues that the perception of crisis is itself symptomatic of a deeper problem that has roots in both the Confucian tradition of kinship and the modern state management of stranger sociality. This ambitious work is the first to investigate the figure of the stranger—foreigner, peasant migrant, bourgeois intellectual, class enemy, unattached woman, animal—across literature, film, television, and museum culture. Lee's aim is to show that hope lies with a robust civil society in which literature and the arts play a key role in sharpening the moral faculties and apprenticing readers in the art of living with strangers. In so doing, she makes a historical, comparative, and theoretically informed contribution to the on-going conversation on China's "(un)civil society."
