Jung Chang's Wild Swans is a memoir, but it helped me get a grip on the conflicting narratives of twentieth-century revolutionary China and why I'd heard such different stories about who were the Good Guys from my mom (who was alive during WWII), my Chinese teacher from Shanghai, my waishengren (Chinese-born Taiwanese) Chinese history teacher from Taipei, and my Taiwanese-Taiwanese friends. I mean, before college, obviously.
I'm afraid relatively few of the books I read as a history major focusing on China or in my MA program in East Asian studies were by Chinese authors, so most of my favorite books aren't, such as History in Three Keys by Paul Cohen (a fascinating book about the Boxer Rebellion and about the creation of "history").
If you can get it through a library, there's the Handbook of Chinese Popular Culture, ed. Wu Dingbo and Patrick D. Murphy. Of course it's awfully dated when it discusses twentieth century stuff, but it basically connects the threads of history and tradition with more recent times (including fun bits on wuxia and science fiction).
Most of the books I have are really specific and run toward things like anthologies of women's poetry and stuff like that, or cottage industry in southern China during some specific time period, so not too useful. :p
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Date: 2009-10-26 09:08 pm (UTC)I'm afraid relatively few of the books I read as a history major focusing on China or in my MA program in East Asian studies were by Chinese authors, so most of my favorite books aren't, such as History in Three Keys by Paul Cohen (a fascinating book about the Boxer Rebellion and about the creation of "history").
If you can get it through a library, there's the Handbook of Chinese Popular Culture, ed. Wu Dingbo and Patrick D. Murphy. Of course it's awfully dated when it discusses twentieth century stuff, but it basically connects the threads of history and tradition with more recent times (including fun bits on wuxia and science fiction).
Most of the books I have are really specific and run toward things like anthologies of women's poetry and stuff like that, or cottage industry in southern China during some specific time period, so not too useful. :p