The Odyssey of a Manchurian

by Belle Yang
The Odyssey of a Manchurian
Author: Belle Yang
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1996
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:
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After the defeat of Japan in World War II, China is plunged into a civil war between Communist and Nationalist forces. The old and respected Manchurian House of Yang is toppled in the chaos, and seventeen-year-old Baba, the Yangs' fourth and most audacious son, is forced to leave Manchuria and his family behind. He journeys south on blistered feet, plagued by constant hunger. As the Communists overrun the crumbling Nationalist army, suspicion and paranoia become the norm, and Baba must outrun the tide of silence and betrayal engulfing the countryside. From Beiping, the ancient capital, to the great Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, on to splendid, decadent Shanghai, he is swept up in a desperate exodus fleeing the Communist takeover, witnessing examples of rare courage and generosity as well as incidents of monstrous connivance and greed. When the southern provinces fall to the Communists, Baba is forced to abandon the mainland for the island of Taiwan.

The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures

by Jeannette Shambaugh Elliot
The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures
Author: Jeannette Shambaugh Elliot
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2015-07-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780295801384
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The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures traces the three-thousand-year history of the emperor's imperial collection, from the Bronze Age to the present. The tortuous story of these treasures involves a succession of dynasties, invasion and conquest, and civil war, resulting in valiant attempts to rescue and preserve the collection. Throughout history, different Chinese regimes used the imperial collection to bolster their own political legitimacy, domestically and internationally. The narrative follows the gradual formation of the Peking Palace Museum in 1925, then its hasty fragmentation as large parts of the collection were moved perilously over long distances to escape wartime destruction, and finally its formal division into what are today two Palace Museums-one in Beijing, the other in Taipei. Enlivened by the personalities of those who cared for the collection, this textured account of the imperial treasures highlights magnificent artworks and their arduous transit through politics, war, and diplomatic reconciliations. Over the years, control of the collections has been fiercely contested, from early dynasties through Mongol and Japanese invaders to Nationalist and Communist rivals- a saga that continues today. This first book-length investigation of the imperial collections will be of great interest to China scholars, historians, and Chinese art specialists. Its tales of palace intrigue will fascinate a wide variety of readers.

Odyssey of a Taishan American

by James L Eng
Odyssey of a Taishan American
Author: James L Eng
Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2018-12-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1489720693
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The use of coaching books systematically deceived the American immigration system during the years following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Follow Jim’s life as an eight-year-old immigrant from Taishan whose diligent memorization of false identities, dates and places erased all memories of his boyhood in China. After facing language difficulties and isolation during assimilation and education, he eventually achieves academic success. But then he must overcome the institutional racism of the 1950s, and reaches the plateau of middle class America during the Cold War. He finds himself oddly suited to the silence and secrecy shrouding his work with the military and NASA. But despite having lived the American Dream, he sees the world as a Chinese American in a racist society. Mr. Eng completed this memoir at the age of 95. He attributes his health, long life, and success to his beautiful wife Lan.

The End of the Odyssey of the Idiots

by David Baker
The End of the Odyssey of the Idiots
Author: David Baker
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2020-11-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1664140379
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The Odyssey of the Idiots is an autobiography of the author with satirical tones discussing the politics and history that have led America to where it is today. Manuscript’s Strengths • The author uses an educated style and language that will appeal to an educated/scholarly audience. This language sets up the book to be for an educated audience who has some understanding of the topic and wishes to learn more regarding the issues discussed. • Including the glossary of terms in the back of the book was great on the part of the author to provide a tool for readers to fully understand the author’s terminology in the book. It adds a reference for readers to be able to refer to if they need further clarification of terms, which will assist in their better grasping the author’s meanings and message. • The author’s language holds a dramatic and descriptive flair that helps contribute to the engagement of readers in the text. It makes the author’s writing unique and adds something readers may not find elsewhere.

At the Frontier of God's Empire

by Ji Li
At the Frontier of God's Empire
Author: Ji Li
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197656056
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To a lively cast of international players that shaped Manchuria during the early twentieth century, At the Frontier of God's Empire adds the remarkable story of Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876-1948). A French Catholic missionary, Caubrière arrived in Manchuria on the eve of the Boxer Uprising in 1899 and was murdered on the eve of the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1948. Living with ordinary Chinese people for half a century, Caubrière witnessed the collapse of the Qing empire, the warlord's chaos that followed, the rise and fall of Japanese Manchukuo, and the emergence of communist China. Caubrière's incredible personal archive, on which Ji Li draws extensively, opens a unique window into everyday interaction between Manchuria's grassroots society and international players. His gripping accounts personalize the Catholic Church's expansion in East Asia and the interplay of missions and empire in local society. Through Caubrière's experience, At the Frontier of God's Empire examines Chinese people at social and cultural margins during this period. A wealth of primary sources, family letters, and visual depictions of village scenes illuminate vital issues in modern Chinese history, such as the transformation of local society, mass migration and religion, tensions between church and state, and the importance of cross-cultural exchanges in everyday life in Chinese Catholic communities. This intense transformation of Manchurian society embodies the clash of both domestic and international tensions in the making of modern China.

Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey

by Michael E. Robinson
Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey
Author: Michael E. Robinson
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2007-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824863275
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For more than half of the twentieth century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two hostile and competitive nation-states, each claiming to be the sole legitimate expression of the Korean nation. The division remains an unsolved problem dating to the beginnings of the Cold War and now projects the politics of that period into the twenty-first century. Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910. Robinson breaks new ground with his analysis of the colonial period, tracing the ideological division of contemporary Korea to the struggle of different actors to mobilize a national independence movement at the time. More importantly, he locates the reason for successful Japanese hegemony in policies that included—and thus implicated—Koreans within the colonial system. He concludes with a discussion of the political and economic evolution of South and North Korea after 1948 that accounts for the valid legitimacy claims of both nation-states on the peninsula.

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale

by Belle Yang
Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale
Author: Belle Yang
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2011-06-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393634817
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“A healing portrait drawn in epic ink strokes.”—Elle When Belle Yang was forced to take refuge in her parents’ home after an abusive boyfriend began stalking her, her father entertained her with stories of old China. The history she’d ignored while growing up became a source of comfort and inspiration, and narrowed the gap separating her—an independent, Chinese-American woman—from her Old World Chinese parents. In Forget Sorrow, Yang makes her debut into the graphic form with the story of her father’s family, reunited under the House of Yang in Manchuria during the Second World War and struggling—both together and individually—to weather poverty, famine, and, later, Communist oppression. The parallels between Belle Yang’s journey of self-discovery and the lives and choices of her grandfather, his brothers, and their father (the Patriarch) speak powerfully of the conflicts between generations—and of possibilities for reconciliation. Forget Sorrow demonstrates the power of storytelling and remembrance, as Belle—in telling this story—finds the strength to honor both her father and herself.

Harbin

by Mark Gamsa
Harbin
Author: Mark Gamsa
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487533764
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This book offers an intimate portrait of early twentieth-century Harbin, a city in Manchuria where Russian colonialists, and later refugees from the Revolution, met with Chinese migrants. The deep social and intellectual fissures between the Russian and Chinese worlds were matched by a multitude of small efforts to cross the divide as the city underwent a wide range of social and political changes. Using surviving letters, archival photographs, and rare publications, this book also tells the personal story of a forgotten city resident, Baron Roger Budberg, a physician who, being neither Russian nor Chinese, nevertheless stood at the very centre of the cross-cultural divide in Harbin. The biography of an important city, fleshing out its place in the global history of East-West contacts and twentieth-century diasporas, this book is also the history of an individual life and an original experiment in historical writing.

Fascism in Manchuria

by Susanne Hohler
Fascism in Manchuria
Author: Susanne Hohler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2016-12-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786721244
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The history of the Russian fascist movement in Harbin, Manchuria during the 1930s has become increasingly relevant to our understanding of modern Russia. As a railway junction and an important centre of the Jewish Diaspora, the city of Harbin became a focus of Russian emigration to Manchuria in the early 1930s, partly because of its proximity to the resource-rich Manchurian plains. In this multicultural and cosmopolitan setting the first Russian fascist groups were established. Based on an analysis of Russian civil society, Fascism in Manchuria sheds light on the impact of the newly-founded All-Russian Fascist Party on the Russian emigre community, employing the concept of 'dark' civil society. Suzanne Hohler demonstrates how fascist involvement in local civil society increasingly determined public opinion, examining the power of the military organizations, the symbols and style of the fascist organizations, the cult of the leader as well as the 'public-relations' activities of the fascist organizations and of the so-called Russian Club. In this context the book provides not only insights into the history and ideology of the far eastern branch of Russian fascism and its transnational connections, but also touches upon a variety of issues of daily life in the city, issues such as education, drug addiction and hooliganism among Russian youth, the local YMCA, the famous Kaspe kidnapping and the rise of anti-Semitism. Fascist literature from Harbin is being republished in today's Russia, and Fascism in Manchuria provides an important historical context for the thinking and motives which drive the Russian right."