Readers interested in contemporary China will find useful perspectives in these essays by a veteran China watcher.
A potpourri of critical observations about contemporary China from a noted sinologist.
Retired Princeton professor Link, now at the University of California, Riverside, is an expert on Chinese literature and popular culture. This collection of essays, most of them previously published, includes book reviews, op-ed pieces, literary criticism, and memoirish vignettes he’s written for the New York Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and other venues. Grouped under four categories, “Captive China,” “Learning,” “Teachers,” and “Day Job Joys,” these essays, rendered in Link’s lucid prose, take us back to his early days as a student of Chinese literature in the 1960s, when China was virtually closed to the West. Link’s first in-person glimpse of China came in the fall of 1966, when he peered over the border separating the skyscrapers of Hong Kong from the rice paddies of Shenzhen—and spotted a water buffalo. From that first sighting, the young, naïve aficionado of Maoist China went on to teach Chinese language and literature at various U.S. colleges and became an authority in the field who was welcomed by China. But after he became interested in dissident writers, especially in the wake of the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, when he became vocal about human rights issues, Link was blacklisted by the Chinese government and has been denied entry to the country since 1996. While watching China from afar once again, Link wrote many pieces with a touch of nostalgia and a hunger for truth, whether reviews of fiction by authors like Ha Jin and Mo Yan, obituaries of dissenting intellectuals like Fang Lizhi and Liu Binyan, or scholarly studies of popular art forms like xiangsheng (crosstalk).
Readers interested in contemporary China will find useful perspectives in these essays by a veteran China watcher.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781589881983
Page Count: 287
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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