Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land

by Angilee Shah (Editor), Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (Editor)

An artist paints landscapes of faraway places that she cannot identify in order to find her place in the global economy. A migrant worker sorts recyclables and thinks deeply about the soul of his country, while a Taoist mystic struggles to keep his traditions alive. An entrepreneur capitalizes on a growing car culture by trying to convince people not to buy cars. And a 90-year-old woman remembers how the oldest neighborhoods of her city used to be.

These are the exciting and saddening, humorous and confusing stories of utterly ordinary people who are living through China's extraordinary transformations. The immense variety in the lives of these Chinese characters dispels any lingering sense that China has a monolithic population or is just a place where dissidents fight Communist Party loyalists and laborers create goods for millionaires.

Chinese Characters is a collection, as Pankaj Mishra writes in his foreword, "to herald a new golden age of journalism about a ceaselessly fascinating country." Contributors include a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a Macarthur Fellow, the China correspondent to a major Indian newspaper, and scholars whose depth of understanding is matched only by the humanity with which they treat their subjects. Their stories together create a multi-faceted portrait of a country in motion and an introduction to some of the best writing on China today.

With contributions from: Alec Ash, James Carter, Leslie T. Chang, Xujun Eberlein, Harriet Evans, Anna Greenspan, Peter Hessler, Ian Johnson, Ananth Krishnan, Christina Larson, Michelle Dammon Loyalka, James Millward, Evan Osnos, Jeffrey Prescott, Megan Shank

Genres: China, Nonfiction, Travel

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Larissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was very good. I especially enjoyed the essays about education, and the one about painting, though all had something to offer. One point-in the essay about education, Greenspan asserts that Chinese is pictographic. It is not. It is syllabographic.

[Lisa Napoli · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent look at what's happening in China through the lens of interesting people who don't typically make the news.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The essay by Pete Hessler alone is worth the price of admission, but there are a few other excellent reports in this collection - including the opener by Ian Johnson, one about an environmental engineer setting out to gather data on the impact of China's plans to divert water from south to north, and the last trio of essays, which make for a strong finish. Like other reviewers my attention flagged at some points - I suspect this is because a broad selection is presented here - the fifteen essays are classed under five broad topics: Doubters and Believers; Past and Present; Hustlers and Entrepreneurs; Rebels and Reformers; Teachers and Pupils - and the reader is necessarily better acquainted with some aspects and not others; a few stories such as that of the old Beijing Hutongers or the Tibetans were less interesting to me, though I am sure they were well researched and written. The ones I liked tended to use a fascinating, off beat anecdote - Ian Johnson's search for 'true' Taoists, for example, or Hessler's tracing the manufacture of fake European art masterpieces - as a way of exploring well beaten themes (urbanisation, alienation, ultra competitiveness and the pressures of such, generation gaps, tension between old and new values, etc) from a fresh angle. There was also a piece on some of the old Red Guards, and where they are now in life, that was quite interesting.

The most poignant quote (though again not really expressing a new sentiment) is perhaps from Leslie Chang's essay about a girl in the school system: quoting one of her compositions "I sit in my middle school classroom, and the teacher wants us to say goodbye to childhood. I feel at a loss. Happiness is like the twinkling stars suffusing the night sky of childhood. I want only more and more stars. I don't want to see the dawn."

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book. It consists of 15 profiles of ordinary Chinese people written by Western journalists living in the country. I especially liked the ones about old Lady Gao, Yong Ying's Odyssey, several about education and Painting the Outside World----about a young woman who copies American photos for export and her ideas as to what she's painting while the author discovers that many are of Park City, UT and when telling some of the residents about this, they have nearly the same reactions as the young Chinese woman.

[LK · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating half the time, and dry the other half.

[Kimfu · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Chinese Characters" was Book No. 14 for 2013!