Kirjahaku

An account of how Xinran, a Chinese radio presenter, negotiated the minefield of restrictions imposed on her and her fellow journalists in order to reach out to women across the country. Here, through the intimacy of her writing, those women's voices continue to confide in the reader.

As a young girl in China Xinran heard a rumour about a soldier in Tibet who had been brutally fed to the vultures in a ritual known as a sky burial: the tale frightened and fascinated her.

Includes grandparents and great-grandparents who sum up in their own words the vast changes that have overtaken China's people over a century. This book is also at once a journey by the author through time and place, and a memorial to those who have lived through war and civil war, persecution, invasion, revolution, famine, and, Westernization.

What the Chinese Don't Eat collects these pieces together for the first time to give one unique Chinese woman's perspective on the connections and differences between the lives of British and Chinese people today.

Sisters Three, Five and Six don't have much education, but they know two things for certain: their mother is a failure because she hasn't produced a son, and they only merit a number as a name. Together they find jobs, make new friends, and learn more than a few lessons about life...

Ten chapters, ten women and many stories of heartbreak, including her own: Xinran once again takes us right into the lives of Chinese women and their lost daughters.

From A to Z, the Penguin Drop Caps series collects 26 unique hardcovers--featuring cover art by Jessica Hische It all begins with a letter. Fall in love with Penguin Drop Caps, a new series of twenty-six collectible and hardcover editions, each with a type cover showcasing a gorgeously illustrated letter of the alphabet. In a design collaboration between Jessica Hische and Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, the series features unique cover art by Hische, a superstar in the world of type design and illustration, whose work has appeared everywhere from Tiffany & Co. to Wes Anderson's recent film Moonrise Kingdom to Penguin's own bestsellers Committed and Rules of Civility. With exclusive designs that have never before appeared on Hische's hugely popular Daily Drop Cap blog, the Penguin Drop Caps series debuted with an 'A' for Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a 'B' for Charlotte Br nte's Jane Eyre, and a 'C' for Willa Cather's My ntonia. It continues with more perennial classics, perfect to give as elegant gifts or to showcase on your own shelves. X is for Xinran. In 1994, journalist and author Xinran met a Chinese woman with an extraordinary story. For over thirty years, since the 1950s, Shu Wen searched the mountains of north Tibet for her husband, a Chinese military doctor, who was missing in action. Her moving and unforgettable life story brilliantly recreated by Xinran, gives insight into the landscape, religion and people of Tibet. At the same time it illuminates the complex and emotional relationship and history between the Tibetans and Chinese. Traveling thousands of miles, and taken in by a Tibetan family, Shu Wen lived a nomadic life through numerous seasons with silence and simplicity, motivated by her search for her husband. An unforgettable and ultimately uplifting tale of loss, loyalty, courage and survival, above all, Sky Burial is an epic and enduring love story.

China Witness is a remarkable work of oral history that lets us see the cultural upheavals of the past century through the eyes of the Chinese who lived through them. Xinran, acclaimed author of The Good Women of China, traveled across China seeking out the nation's grandparents and great-grandparents, the men and women who experienced firsthand the tremendous changes of the modern era. Although many of them feared repercussions, they spoke with stunning candor about their hopes, fears, and struggles, and about what they witnessed: from the Long March to land reform, from Mao to marriage, from revolution to Westernization. In the same way that Studs Terkel's Working and Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation gave us the essence of very particular times, China Witness gives us the essence of modern China--a portrait more intimate, nuanced, and revelatory than any we have had before.

Drawing on personal interviews with, anecdotes by, and experiences of modern Chinese women at all levels of society, this fascinating study looks at what it means to be a woman in today's China and the political, social, cultural, and personal upheavals they have endured in a complex and repressive society. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

In 1958, notified that her young husband, a doctor in the Chinese army has been killed in action in Tibet, Shu Wen joins the army, determined to go to Tibet to uncover the truth, only to find herself alone in Tibet, embarking on a thirty-year nomadic odyssey that brings her back to a new China, transformed by the Cultural Revolution, in a poignant novel based on a true story. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Now in paperback one of the most stirring accounts of the lives of Chinese women since Wild Swans "full of heart-rending tales....shocking, simply told...a very powerful polemic" (The New York Times Book Review). Following her internationally bestselling book The Good Women of China, Xinran has written one of the most powerful accounts of the lives of Chinese women. She has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothers--students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasants--who, whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions, or hideous economic necessity, have given up their daughters. Xinran beautifully portrays the "extra-birth guerrillas" who travel the roads and the railways, evading the system, trying to hold on to more than one baby; na ve young girl students who have made life-wrecking mistakes; the "pebble mother" on the banks of the Yangtze River still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their families because they can't produce a male heir; and Little Snow, the orphaned baby fostered by Xinran but confiscated by the state. For parents of adopted Chinese children and for the children themselves, this is an indispensable, powerful, and intensely moving book. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is powered by love and by heartbreak and will stay with readers long after they have turned the final page.

Tells the remarkable stories of men and women born in China after 1979 - the recent generations raised under China's single-child policy. From the businessman's son unable to pack his own suitcase, to the PhD student who pulled herself out of extreme rural poverty, this book shows how these generations embody the hopes and fears of a great nation.