Xu Xu 徐訏 (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of nostalgia and melancholy offer today’s readers an unusual glimpse into China’s turbulent twentieth century. These translations--spanning a period of some thirty years, from 1937 until 1965--bring to life some of Xu Xu’s most representative short fictions from prewar Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Afterword illustrates that Xu Xu’s idealistic tendencies in defiance of the politicization of art exemplify his affinity with European romanticism and link his work to a global literary modernity.
This book provides a roadmap for teaching with graphic novels as an effective and engaging approach to advancing reading comprehension for English Learners in secondary schools. Accessibly synthesizing and presenting existing graphic novel research, the authors walk through how to use graphic novels as a teaching tool to improve student motivation and key reading skills, increase their reading proficiency levels, and bolster their vocabulary. The authors provide curricular ideas for teaching multilingual, gifted, and striving readers, along with methods for developing critical literacy and multimodal comprehension. Applying a universal design approach and including examples, current graphic novel recommendations, and pedagogical strategies, this book is essential reading for pre-service teachers in TESOL and literacy education.
This book offers revolutionary approaches to in-class discussions about young adult literature. It shows teachers how to think more widely than the themes of a book to consider how they might operate as prayers of lament, yearning, anger, confession, thankfulness, reconciliation, joy, obedience, pilgrimage, contemplation, and equanimity. It also offers a variety of ways for classroom discussion to consider a representative sentence or two from a young adult novel, and from that allow students to connect to linked passages in the rest of the novel. These approaches for classroom discussion are drawn from a variety of contemplative traditions, including Jewish and Christian faith traditions and include florilegium, lectio divina, PaRDeS, Ignatian Imagination, havruta, and marginalia. Drawing from a range of in-class experiences, the authors explain each approach in the context of twelve popular and critically interesting young adult novels including The Hate U Give, Long Way Down, Speak, The Poet X, The Fault in our Stars, Brown Girl Dreaming, and others. This book will transform discussions that are disconnected from the book, lacking in relevance, or missing the energy that drives good conversation into meaningful and energetic class discussions that students and teachers alike will value.
The story of China¿s rights movement---a struggle for basic human rights and democracy that, despite harsh repression, has endured for more than a decade---unfolds in Xu Zhiyong¿s compelling personal memoir. In recognition of his work as an activist, lawyer, and founder of the New Citizen Movement, Dr. Xu was named one of Asia Weekly¿s People of the Year in 2005 and one of the Southern People¿s Weekly¿s Top Ten Young Leaders of China in 2006. His efforts have been considerably less well received, however, by the government of the PRC, and he has been arrested numerous times. Dr. Xu has been serving a four-year prison sentence since 2013 for ¿gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.¿ His moving statement at the end of his trial, hailed as the China Manifesto, is included in To Build a Free China.
ONE OF THE FOREMOST WORKS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINESE LITERATURE This beautifully portrayed epic family history spans one hundred years, from the 1890s during the later stages of the Qing Dynasty to the 1990s, traversing the experiences of five generations of women. Yu is the central character, whose life story is woven through the lives of her grandmother, mother, sisters, and niece. She loves her parents but at a tender age realizes they do not love her. After committing two unforgivable sins, she is sent away to live in the city but is soon abandoned. Yu's life becomes a quest for love; she is fragile but resilient, lonely but determined. Now, in the 1980s, Yu becomes caught up in the political storm and comes close to love but falls short. Her last chance at getting what she desires will ultimately come at a tragic cost. A political satirist in the guise of a mystical writer, Xu Xiaobin masterfully creates an atmosphere where distinctions are blurred; memories of the past and present are intertwined; realities and illusions are fused without a clear trace; and events occur in unspecified places but tinted with fairylike imaginations. Xu Xiaobin is a rare talent with a vast knowledge of history, religion, and culture, and occupies a unique place in modern Chinese literature. When Feathered Serpent won China's inaugural Creative Writing Award for women's literary fiction, it was described as "a breakthrough, a record-setting novel in China's women's literature" and "the best fiction at the end of the century in China.
The author recalls growing up in Mao's China as the daughter of pioneering artist Xu Beihong, describing how her family and her father's legacy survived the turbulence of Mao's ever-changing policies, which dictated the direction of art and music from 1949 to 1976.
A masterpiece." —The Washington Post "It was impossible. All of China was a prison in those days." Mao Zedong’s labor reform camps, known as the laogai, were notoriously brutal. Modeled on the Soviet Gulag, they subjected their inmates to backbreaking labor, malnutrition, and vindictive wardens. They were thought to be impossible to escape—but one man did. Xu Hongci was a bright young student at the Shanghai No. 1 Medical College, spending his days studying to be a professor and going to the movies with his girlfriend. He was also an idealistic and loyal member of the Communist Party and was generally liked and well respected. But when Mao delivered his famous February 1957 speech inviting “a hundred schools of thought [to] contend,” an earnest Xu Hongci responded by posting a criticism of the party—a near-fatal misstep. He soon found himself a victim of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, condemned to spend the next fourteen years in the laogai. Xu Hongci became one of the roughly 550,000 Chinese unjustly imprisoned after the spring of 1957, and despite the horrific conditions and terrible odds, he was determined to escape. He failed three times before finally succeeding, in 1972, in what was an amazing and arduous triumph. Originally published in Hong Kong, Xu Hongci’s remarkable memoir recounts his life from childhood through his final prison break. After discovering his story in a Hong Kong library, the journalist Erling Hoh tracked down the original manuscript and compiled this condensed translation, which includes background on this turbulent period, an epilogue that follows Xu Hongci up to his death, and Xu Hongci’s own drawings and maps. Both a historical narrative and an exhilarating prison-break thriller, No Wall Too High tells the unique story of a man who insisted on freedom—even under the most treacherous circumstances.
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