BOOKPATHS

Beijing, China

Anthony Kuhn joins author Diane Wei Liang on a walk “through Beijing’s maze of alleyways, known as hutongs, where Liang’s fictional detective, Mei Wang, hunts down leads….”

A native of Beijing, author Diane Wei Liang now lives in London, where she writes her mystery novels in English. But though she simplifies some of the Chinese names and details in her books for the benefit of her foreign audience, Liang's fiction is still steeped in the sights and sounds of her homeland. – from “Crime and Consequences in Beijing’s Back Alleys,” by Anthony Kuhn, NPR Website

China

Lost in Translation, by Nicole Mones (New York: Delta, 1999; first published in 1998)

First published in 1998, Nicole Mones first novel, Lost in Translation, transports readers into “the vast, uncharted terrain of northwest China,” where Dr. Adam Spencer believes he’ll find the missing remains of Peking Man, first discovered in the 1920s, only to vanish in 1941.   Inspired by the work and writings of real-life Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, present at the discovery of Peking Man, Spencer leads an expedition that includes Alice Mannegan, an American translator living in China, hoping to escape her past; and two Chinese researchers, one attracted to Alice, but still haunted by his wife’s disappearance during the “Chaos” many years before.  Nicole Mones is becoming one of my favorite contemporary novelists, with story, history, and sense of place interweaving into novels both compelling and enlightening.

First they had to cross the Helan Shan.  Through most of its length, running north-south parallel to the local flow of the Yellow River, it was a towering escarpment – completely impassable.  Its limestone walls rose from four thousand to thirteen thousand feet in less than a mile.  So they had to drive around to the south end, where the range crumbled down to brown peaks of dirt and rock and was cut by passes.  They rattled up the burning asphalt road.  The jeep engine groaned down a gear.  Alice laid her head on the seat and watched the gray specter of the Helan Shan’s crest, the wall of rock Teilhard had loved, a million years in the making. – from Lost in Translation, by Nicole Mones

Nicole Mones Website

China -- Beijing; Jingdezhen

A Cup of Light: a Novel, by Nicole Mones (New York:  Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2003; first published in 2002)

Following Chinese porcelain specialist Lia Frank as she appraises a Beijing collection of more than 800 pieces, readers are pulled into the history and underworld of porcelain.  A sweet love story and strong sense of place, whether in modern Beijing or in Jingdezhen, China’s “Porcelain Capital,” add to the novel’s drama and pleasure.

He walked along the river, with mattresses and clothing spread out to dry all along its banks.  People squatted among their possessions, scrubbing off mud and drying their pots and their baskets and their books one by one.

After a while he raised his hand for a clattery little aluminum-can taxi and rode northwest, away from the center of town, toward Yu’s place.  The awnings and poor storefronts fell away.  Dark leaves crowded along the base of the old stone and concrete walls, lowering and settling, closing around little houses and courtyards that spread out and relaxed into larger, more rambling spaces as the puttering taxi left the downtown behind.

Many of these dwellings were also studios, or small family factories.  Ninety-five percent of the people who made pots here in Jingdezhen worked at home.  Yes, some of the big factories were still running, turning out dishware, pouring black smoke up to heaven.  They supplied the world with what was everywhere called ‘china.’ But the factories employed only a fraction of Jingdezhen’s porcelain people, and the less skilled ones at that.  The best artists worked alone. – from A Cup of Light: a Novel, by Nicole Mones

Related Websites

Nicole Mones Website

Publisher’s Website

China

Red Azalea, by Anchee Min (New York: Anchor Books, 2006; first published in 1994)

Red Azalea is Anchee Min’s frightening, fascinating, and celebrated memoir of growing up during “the last years of Mao’s China.”  Readers follow Min through her childhood; working on Red Fire Farm during her teenage years; selection and training as an actress; eventual fall from favor; and emigration to the United States.

I was raised on the teachings of Mao and on the operas of Madam Mao, Comrade Jiang Ching. I became a leader of the Little Red Guards in elementary school. This was during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution when red was my color. My parents lived like--as the neighbors described them--a pair of chopsticks: always in harmony My father was an instructor of industrial technique drawing at Shanghai Textile Institute, although his true love was astronomy. My mother was a teacher at a Shanghai middle school. She taught whatever the Party asked, one semester in Chinese and the next in Russian. My parents both believed in Mao and the Communist Party, just like everybody else in the neighborhood. They had four children, each one a year apart. I was born in 1957. We lived in the city, on South Luxuriant Road in a small two-story townhouse occupied by two families. The house was left by my grandfather, who had died of tuberculosis right before I was born. – from Red Azalea, by Anchee Min

Publisher’s Website

China

The Last Chinese Chef, by Nicole Mones (New York, NY:  A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007)

When food writer Maggie McElroy travels to China to settle a claim on her late husband’s estate, she decides to “stay sane” by accepting an assignment from her editor -- profile one of China’s gifted chefs as he plans the “banquet of a lifetime” for “China’s Olympic culinary competition.” McElroy’s assignment takes readers into the fascinating, sensual, and “hidden world of elite cuisine in modern China,” with culinary roots reaching deep into Chinese history and traditions.

Food was the code of etiquette and the definer of hierarchy too.  Sam had made her see that a meal was food but also a presentation of symbols, suggestions, and references, connecting people not only to one another but to their culture, art, and history. -- from The Last Chinese Chef, by Nicole Mones

Related Websites

Nicole Mones Website (includes recipes and restaurant recommendations)

Publisher’s Website

Shanxi, China

Writer Aric Chen “rediscovers his ancestral roots in Shanxi Province in northern China and pieces together the story of his maternal grandparents.”

“My mother and I had arrived in her birthplace, our ancestral home. And as the train rolled past centuries-old Ming dynasty watchtowers, melting forlornly into the hills, I recalled the words of Zhang Jigang, the Shanxinese choreographer whom I had met in Beijing. ‘You’ll see how important Shanxi is to Chinese civilization,’ Mr. Zhang, a director of the Olympic opening ceremony, told me. ‘In my opinion, you cannot know China without knowing Shanxi.’” – from “Bridging Generations on China’s High Plateau,” by Aric Chen, The New York Times

China

Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: a Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, by Fuchsia Dunlop (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008)

In 1994, British food writer Fuchsia Dunlop went to China to study for a year at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, with the underlying motive of eating “whatever the Chinese might put in front of me.”  Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper describes her journey, of people and place, and best of all, cuisine, from “spicy aubergines” to “duck tongues.”

A few months later, a colleague at the BBC suggested I apply for a British Council scholarship to study in China.  She helped me devise a worthy plan to investigate Chinese policy on ethnic minorities, a subject that had interested me for some time.  Filling in the scholarship form, I came up with various academically convincing reasons for basing my research in Chengdu.  I wanted to avoid the expatriate centres of Beijing and Shanghai, so that I had a chance to immerse myself in Chinese life and the Chinese language – never mind that Sichuan dialect is a notoriously distorted version of Mandarin.  Then there was Sichuan’s location on the fringes of Han Chinese China, near the borderlands inhabited by Tibetans, Yi, Qiang, and countless other minorities.  It all sounded quite plausible.  But as I filled in the boxes on the form and composed my personal declaration, I must confess that I was thinking also about sweet and spicy aubergines, of a fish lazing in chili-bean sauce, of frilly pig’s kidneys and Sichuan pepper.  Fortunately, the British Council and the Chinese government agreed that Chengdu was a suitable place for me to study, and they gave me my grant, a golden ticket to explore China for a year, with no strings attached. – from Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, by Fuchsia Dunlop

Publisher’s Website

China

Poets and Murder: a Judge Dee Mystery, by Robert van Gulik (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005; first published in 1968)

Sinologist and Dutch diplomat Robert van Gulik based his Judge Dee mystery series on a historical person, “a brilliant detective and famous statesman of the Tang dynasty” who lived from 630 to 700 A.D.  In Poets and Murder, Judge Dee determines to solve a double murder, that of a “mild-mannered student…rumored to have been slain by a fox-demon” and a “young dancer [who] “meets her death as she dresses to perform for the magistrate’s illustrious dinner guests.”  Set during the Mid-Autumn Festival, readers are transported to ancient China, with glimpses into Chinese literary life; the “three creeds” of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism; and fox-lore.  Pleasurable and informative, if I were traveling to the Olympics, I’d be packing a couple of Judge Dee mysteries in my bag.

It was curious that the superstition about fox-magic was so strong in this district.  Popular belief all over the country credited the fox with supernatural powers, and the storytellers on the market loved to expand on old tales of foxes changing themselves into beautiful young girls to bewitch young men, or into old gentlemen of venerable appearance who led unsuspecting young girls astray.  But classical literature, on the contrary, stated that the fox had mystic powers over malicious spirits.  Therefore one would often find in old palaces and public offices a small shrine dedicated to the fox spirit, which was supposed to ward off evil, and to protect especially the official seals, the emblems of authority.  He thought he had seen such a small shrine in his colleague’s residence. – from Poets and Murder: a Judge Dee Mystery, by Robert van Gulik

Publisher’s Website

Beijing, China

Catherine Sampson chooses her “top 10 books on Beijing.”

These ten novels and collections of short stories are rich in satire, and in metaphors for political oppression. Most of the books below are written by Chinese writers who have chosen to live abroad in order to write freely about their country. – from “Caherine Sampson’s Top 10 Books on Beijing," The Guardian

Beijing, China

Heidi Benson talks with Michael Meyer, whose new book, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, “capture[s] the communal life that is disappearing as historic single-story neighborhoods are razed bo make way for tourist-friendly replicas.”

Meyer takes exception to the state's characterization of the old neighborhoods, which sit on valuable land in the center of the city. (His own home sits just south of the city's southern wall, near Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.) 'The hutong is not a slum. Slums cause pathologies," he says. "It is a stable, low-rent area. It's safe. People look out for each other.' – from “Michael Meyer Documents Old Beijing Districts,” by Heidi Benson, San Francisco Chronicle