Legacies a Chinese Mosaic - Hardcover

Lord, Bette Bao

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1855925028 ISBN 13: 9781855925021

Publisher: Chapman Publ. Co, 1990

Synopsis

"Chinese go through life wearing masks: the ones that tradition decrees; the ones that society decrees; and, since Liberation, the ones that the Party decrees."

LEGACIES is the testament of a woman who is at once profoundly a daughter of her ancestral China and equally a child of America. Speakers who are identified only by tags like "actress," "joker" or "peasant" share their feelings and memories with her. We see a surreal society where one day's solid ground is the next day's quicksand. Only the astonishing Chinese could have produced it...or borne it!

"Bette Bao Lord's stunning collection of oral histories is the work of an expert storyteller...portraits that get to the essence of what it means to be Chinese in our time." (The New York Times)

About this title

From the Publisher

8 1.5-hour cassettes

From the Inside Flap

Urgent and timeless, Legacies brings us closer than we have ever been to penetrating the great conundrum of China m the twentieth century. It could only have been written by Bette Bao Lord -- born in China, raised in America, author of the bestselling novel Spring Moon, wife of a former American ambassador to China, resident in Beijing during the "China Spring" of 1989. Lord's unique web of relationships and her sensitive insight have enabled her to observe Chinese life both high and low, Communist and dissident, intellectual and ordinary.
Lord interweaves her own story, and that of her clansmen, with the voices of men and women who recall the tumultuous experience of the last fifty years, and the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. In precise, subtle prose, Lord explores the reality of Red Guards and reeducation camps, of friends and families severed by political disgrace, and captures the individual voices of those caught up in them: the seven-year-old girl with a heart full of hate for her father; the journalist whose girlfriend believes the Party newspapers, not him; the imprisoned scholar who hid his writings in his quilt for years; the anti-revolutionary who tells his bitter story in a vein of high farce. All bear heartbreaking witness to the surreal quality of Chinese society today -- and to the astonishing resilience, humor, and heroic equanimity of the Chinese spirit.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chapman Publ. Co
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 1855925028
• ISBN 13: 9781855925021
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1