The girl in the white ship

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Sam Hamill

Du Fu (712–770) is one of the undisputed geniuses of Chinese poetry—still universally admired and read thirteen centuries after his death. Now David Young, author of Black Lab, and well known as a translator of Chinese poets, gives us a sparkling new translation of Du Fu’s verse, arranged to give us a tour of the life, each “chapter” of poems preceded by an introductory paragraph that situates us in place, time, and circumstance. What emerges is a portrait of a modest yet great artist, an ordinary man moving and adjusting as he must in troubled times, while creating a startling, timeless body of work. Du Fu wrote poems that engaged his contemporaries and widened the path of the lyric poet. As his society—one of the world’s great civilizations—slipped from a golden age into chaos, he wrote of the uncertain course of empire, the misfortunes and pleasures of his own family, the hard lives of ordinary people, the changing seasons, and the lives of creatures who shared his environment. As the poet chases chickens around the yard, observes tear streaks on his wife’s cheek, or receives a gift of some shallots from a neighbor, Young’s rendering brings Du Fu’s voice naturally and elegantly to life.

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Denise Chong

The ethos of family is dramatically portrayed by Denise Chong in this tale of her grandmother, brought from China as a young concubine by a sojourner to the New World, of the man's wife and the children who would be left behind, and of the author's own incredible discovery of those children six decades later. Here is a true story, woven from letters, photographs, and memories, with more twists and turns than any novel. It is a story of the lives of one family living on two different sides of the globe: in a village in South China before and after the Communists took power, and in the gritty Chinatowns on North America's west coast. The "at-home" wife would hold sacred the honor of the family; supporting her was the concubine who sacrificed her own family in working the tea houses abroad, in "Gold Mountain." In tow was her youngest daughter, the author's mother. It was she who unlocked the past for her daughter, whose curiosity about some old photographs ultimately reunited this family, who had been divided for most of this century.

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Pu Ning

"You must believe my eyes." Thus implores Han Wei-tien as he recounts his long years of "reform through labor" in the prison camps of Communist China. Arrested as a spy for Chiang Kai-shek at the beginning of the Korean War, the thirty-four-year-old Han was dropped into a dry well sixty feet deep and five feet wide, which would serve as his prison cell for the next two years - until the deprivation had blinded him, though not broken his will. Nor would that will be broken over the next two decades, though Han would spend most of those years in a succession of jails and "labor correction" camps.

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Hanna Davidson Pankowsky

On September 27, 1939, after the Nazi invasion, Poland ceased to exist as a nation. Ten-year-old Hanna Davidson's father, Simon, and older brother, Kazik, had been drafted to defend Warsaw. Hanna and her mother, Sophia, found themselves subjected to Hitler's efforts to dehumanize Poland's Jewish population. But when they got word that Simon and Kazik were alive in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland, Hanna and her mother decided to risk a harrowing escape from Nazi Poland into safer Soviet territory. With only the clothes on their backs, they left their apartment. If the two-percent chance of surviving the crossing were not daunting enough, then the Davidsons' prospects in the Soviet Union should have been. Simon Davidson's capitalist and anti-communist activities in Poland would brand him an undesirable. Worse, he had been born in Russia - escaping years before by fooling Soviet authorities into presuming him dead - and his resurfacing would endanger those members of his family who remained behind. So the Davidsons were compelled to invent and memorize not only their own new identities but also an extended family history. Moreover, avoiding persecution by the Soviet regime entailed maintaining a pretense of allegiance to Stalin. As recounted by Hanna, the Davidsons' journey into the Soviet interior makes for a singular story.