Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged China

Last Train Home

The establishing longshot of this documentary tilts down to show a few policemen in an open, paved space. Slowly the camera pans left, and the entire frame fills with thousands of people standing in a drizzle. Many hold bright, pastel-coloured umbrellas. It’s a beautiful image. The following shot, from ground level, shows that huge crowd rushing in pandemonium past the camera into a train station. These two shots are emblematic of the film: beauty and chaos inextricably interwoven.

Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China

Residents of Fujian Province on the southeastern coast of China burn spirit money designed to resemble U. S. currency. That stunning confluence of traditional religious practice and modern dreams of western emigration stands as a kind of symbolic center of this book. In her ethnographic study of the people of this region, famous-or infamous, perhaps—for their involvement in “human smuggling” to the West, Julie Y. Chu asks why so many people would honor the dead with images of western materialism.

The Story of Lee (Volume 1)

The Story of Lee is a graphic novel written by Seán Michael Wilson, the editor of AX: Alternative Manga. Wilson writes mainly for a mature international manga audience, and like most other Japanese style comics, it is serialized: I had the pleasure of reading just the beginning of a larger story arc.

Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China

Heroin. AIDS. Migration. Development programs. Gender roles. In Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China, Shao-hua Liu examines each of these issues and how they relate to Nuoso youth. An anthropological researcher, the author delves into how China’s evolution from the traditional to the modern intersects with drug use, disease, and development.

Dream of Ding Village

Grandfather Ding is the patriarch of the family that founded Ding Village. He dreams of a world that sometimes comes true and sometimes should but doesn't. Both of his sons are ne’er-do-wells, one a crooked, arrogant man who becomes a high level Communist cadre with boatloads of money, the other a layabout who makes nothing of his life. The older son makes his money from being a “blood head," a man who buys and sells blood in the rural communities and ultimately infects an entire Chinese province with AIDS through contaminated blood.

A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop

I walked out of the screening of A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop feeling vaguely dissatisfied. While the official selection of the 2010 Berlin Film Festival bills itself as a “black comedy thriller [which serves] as an expose of how intense desires can consume humanity,” it neither thrills nor tickles the funny bone.

Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary

The study of female homoeroticism in Chinese media is a small yet evolving academic discipline. It is, therefore, of great importance that Backward Glances was written.

A Thread of Sky

Six Chinese American female characters form the main narrative perspectives of Deanna Fei’s ambitious first novel, A Thread of Sky. There is family matriarch Lin Yulan, once a revolutionary for the nationalist party in China, and her daughters Irene and Susan.

Abby and Jules

Early in Lia Quince’s novel Abby and Jules, adolescent protagonist Abby steps onto a street in Beijing on her own for the first time. She is conflicted, carrying both the naïve adolescent confidence that she can survive alone in any city and the awareness that she is a white woman in China. The swirl of teenage emotions is thoughtfully captured. Unfortunately, this one moment is the high point of the novel.

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China

No one will fail to notice this giant red book on your bookshelf.

Chosen By Desire (The Guardians of Destiny)

Kate Perry is a pretty kickass chick. Her childhood dream was to be a ninja, and she's now a seventh degree Kung Fu blackbelt.

China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa

In China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing's Expansion in Africa, Serge Michel and Michel Beuret invest a lot of time and energy in examining China’s presence in African countries. They travel to various places to interview different people in order to find out what affects Chinese business has across the continent.

"Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China

"Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China is an account by journalist Lijia Zhang, who came of age in China during the ‘80s.

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

It’s easy to disregard sex workers, to relegate them to the margins of society and pretend that they don’t exist in the perfect little world that is uncomfortable with the idea that there are members of our population who have sex for money. Often considered an untouchable part of society (no matter what culture we’re talking about), sex workers are often overlooked in anthropological or sociological studies with many researchers content to look at the more accepted members of society rather than delve into the seedy underbelly of urban life.

24 City

24 City, a film that expertly mixes documentary footage and fictional reenactments, follows several generations of women living and working in Chengdu City for Xinda Machinery’s Chengfu Group. Factory 420, a not-so-well-kept state secret, has since been turned into residential housing.

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

On one occasion, gangsters walked into the bar, grabbed me by the arm, and started dragging me up the stairs toward a private room intended for hostesses’ sexual encounters with clients. The women were also sometimes raped there by gangsters. I quickly realized what was going on—that I was in real danger... Whereas safety was a major issue, hygiene was another. Living in a filthy karaoke bar room without bathing facilities, I had lice in my hair and over my whole body.

Repeat After Me

Rachel DeWoskin’s debut novel, Repeat After Me, is a cultural love story between two people whose lives briefly intertwine. Afterwards, they are never the same again. The story follows the relationship between a young neurotic ESL teacher in Manhattan, Aysha Silvermintz, and her student, Da Ge, a mysterious, silent, Chinese national who comes to the U.S.

Where Underpants Come From: From Checkout to Cotton Field: Travels Through the New China and Into the New Global Economy

It’s absolutely astonishing to realize how much junk people in North America consume only to throw away. Most of it is from China. When I started to read Where Underpants Come From, I picked up various objects in my office—from the mechanical pencil I write with to my iPod—and I discovered that yes, everything had been made in China.

Yi As Akh Padshah Bai (There Was a Queen)

Yi As Akh Padshah Bai (There Was a Queen) is a documentary that tells the story of women in Kashmir, the northwestern region of the India currently controlled by Pakistan, India, and China. The directors dub it "the world's most picturesque conflict zone". India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir, and conflict has been a constant in the region since the 1990's when Kashmiri separatists began clashing with both Pakistani and Indian forces.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

It's rare that I find myself so drawn in by a book that it puts a smile on my face. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles did that and more. At its most basic, this book is about Chinese food in the United States - where it came from, its evolution, and the influence it has had on American dining.

Lust, Caution

Ang Lee seems to have a thing for short story adaptations and violent sexual encounters. While I respect much of Lee’s previous work and believe he often possesses masterful vision, Lust, Caution is a sadistic, repulsive disaster. Lee takes great liberties with this pseudo-drama portraying an amateur conspiracy against a prominent Japanese collaborator in 1940s occupied China.

The Last Empress

An ancient sage once foretold, “China would be destroyed by a woman.” Historians described Empress Tzu Hsi of the Qing Dynasty as an evil leader hell-bent on the usurpation of power. This much-documented image later served to affirm the age-old prophecy. The Last Empress by Anchee Min is the sequel to the acclaimed _Empress Orchid _(2004). Set towards the end of Imperial China, Min continues the heartbreaking tale of the country’s downfall at the hands of merciless foreigners.
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