‘Velvet-red meat patterned with seams of fat like the finest Dali marble. Time has done its work.’ Zhang Mei has always cherished the ham from her native province of Yunnan, China. Growing up in Dali on the banks of the Xi’er River, Mei relished the morsels of ham her father would toss into a dish of spicy green peppers and onions. Over time she learned that the true magic of Yunnan ham lies not just in its salty-sweet taste, produced by an intricate curing process, but also in its ability to bring people together and carry on a time-honoured way of life. Now a successful entrepreneur, Mei returns to her childhood home, finds a leg of ham and travels with it through the cultural and culinary cradle of Dali. Her edible companion becomes a calling card that takes her into the history and traditions of the region and unveils the unique stories and recipes of those who call it home.
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.
Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction “sugar”—or, as some say in Belize, “traveling with sugar.” A decade in the making, this book unfolds as a series of crónicas—a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those “still fighting it” as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, these individuals speak back to science and policy misrecognitions that have prematurely cast their lost limbs and deaths as normal. Their families’ arts of maintenance and repair illuminate ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine.
Written by locals, Fodor's travel guides have been offering expert advice for all tastes and budgets for more than 80 years. Unforgettable artwork, heavenly villages, and dream cities--there are so many reasons to visit France that deciding where to go and what to do can be a bit overwhelming. Fodor's Essential France takes the guesswork out of choosing the perfect French experiences by compiling the top choices chosen by Fodor's army of France-based writers. This travel guide includes: · Dozens of full-color maps · Hundreds of hotel and restaurant recommendations, with Fodor's Choice designating our top picks · Multiple itineraries to explore the top attractions and what’s off the beaten path · Side trips from Paris including Chartres, Versailles, and Monet's Garden · Coverage of Paris Neighbourhoods, Western Ile-de-France, Eastern Ile-de-France, Loire Valley, and Grenoble Planning to focus on just part of France? Check out Fodor's travel guides to Paris and Provence & the French Riviera.
A witty history of the state that's always in the news, for everything from alligator attacks to zany crimes. There's an old clip of Bugs Bunny sawing the entire state of Florida off the continent—and every single time a news story springs up about some shenanigans in Florida, someone on the internet posts it in response. Why are we so ready to wave goodbye to the Sunshine State? In A Florida State of Mind: An Unnatural History of Our Weirdest State, James D. Wright makes the case that there are plenty of reasons to be scandalized by the land and its sometimes-kooky, sometimes-terrifying denizens, but there's also plenty of room for hilarity. Florida didn't just become weird; it's built that way. Uncharted swampland doesn't easily give way to sprawling suburbia. It took violent colonization, land scams to trick non-Floridians into buying undeveloped property, and the development of railroads to benefit one man's hotel empire. Even the most natural parts of Florida are unnatural. Florida citrus? Not from here, but from China. Gators? Oh, they're from Florida all right, but that doesn't make having 1 per every 20 humans normal. Animals...in the form of roadkill? Only Florida allows you to keep anything you kill on the road (and anything you find). Yet everyone loves Florida: tourists come in droves, and people relocate to Florida constantly (only 36% of residents were born there). Crammed with unforgettable stories and facts, Florida will show readers exactly why.
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In 1971, Lee Myonghi, aged five, was taken from her family and placed in a Korean orphanage. Six months later, she was flown to the United States, where she and two other Korean girls were adopted by a Minnesota couple. They renamed her Kelly Jean. Eleven years later, Kelly found herself at the doorstep of a Minnesota agency, although this time as a teen mother giving her own child up for adoption. Kelly later married and had two more children. Then, in 2007, Kelly's husband found her original, Korean family, and so began a journey that reunited Kelly with the family whom she thought had abandoned her, and brought her face to face with the daughter she herself had lost twenty-five years before. Told with refreshing honesty, Songs of My Families is a moving story of two generations of women forced to make agonizing choices as they coped with harsh economic realities and personal crises. It is also an affirmation of the strength of family, the importance of one's cultural heritage, and the enduring power of love.
Praise for Sun Yung Shin: Finalist for the Believer Poetry Award "[her] work reads like redactions, offering fragments to be explored, investigated and interrogated, making her reader equal partner in the creation of meaning."—Star Tribune Sun Yung Shin moves ideas—of identity (Korean, American, adoptee, mother, Catholic, Buddhist) and interest (mythology, science fiction, Sophocles)— around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be at home. What is a cyborg but a hybrid creature of excess? A thing that exceeds the sum of its parts. A thing that has extended its powers, enhanced, even superpowered.
"A major contribution to the study of global events in times of global media. Owning the Olympics tests the possibilities and limits of the concept of 'media events' by analyzing the mega-event of the information age: the Beijing Olympics. . . . A good read from cover to cover." —Guobin Yang, Associate Professor, Asian/Middle Eastern Cultures & Sociology, Barnard College, Columbia University From the moment they were announced, the Beijing Games were a major media event and the focus of intense scrutiny and speculation. In contrast to earlier such events, however, the Beijing Games are also unfolding in a newly volatile global media environment that is no longer monopolized by broadcast media. The dramatic expansion of media outlets and the growth of mobile communications technology have changed the nature of media events, making it significantly more difficult to regulate them or control their meaning. This volatility is reflected in the multiple, well-publicized controversies characterizing the run-up to Beijing 2008. According to many Western commentators, the People's Republic of China seized the Olympics as an opportunity to reinvent itself as the "New China"---a global leader in economics, technology, and environmental issues, with an improving human-rights record. But China's maneuverings have also been hotly contested by diverse global voices, including prominent human-rights advocates, all seeking to displace the official story of the Games. Bringing together a distinguished group of scholars from Chinese studies, human rights, media studies, law, and other fields, Owning the Olympics reveals how multiple entities---including the Chinese Communist Party itself---seek to influence and control the narratives through which the Beijing Games will be understood. digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.
