Cousin Felix Meets the Buddha: and Other Encounters in China and Tibet - Hardcover

Kaye, Lincoln

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374299986 ISBN 13: 9780374299989

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

Adventures in a nation on the road

Long caricatured as a land of stagnant traditions or lockstep Maoist conformity, China today is a country on the move. Literally—China's new migrant labor pool, known as the "blind river," logs in more road miles and piecework hours than any other workforce in the world—but also mentally and spiritually, as more and more Chinese search for some new faith, whether Maoist, Buddhist, humanist, or laissez-faire - to fill in where decaying Party ideology leaves off. The new China, where religious pilgrims cross paths with born-again capitalists and uprooted communards, is a chaos of true believers pursuing different, often conflicting, visions of fulfillment.

The author and the illustrator, an American newsman and his Taiwanese wife, trail a series of such pilgrims: wandering farmhands, itinerant actors, a qi gong guru, a careerist policeman, a muckraking lawyer, a die-hard revolutionary agitator, a Taiwanese con man, a Tibetan lama, and many more. The result is neither a travelogue nor an analytic set piece, but a moral panorama, lit from within by the divergent hopes of Chinese citizens today.

About this title

About the Author:

Lincoln Kaye has headed the Far Eastern Economic Review bureaus in six Asian countries, including five years in China. He has also written for The Wall Street Journal, Slate and The Nations. He and Hsu Mei-Lang have been married for twenty-five years.

From Publishers Weekly:

Set free from editorial constraints that have bound him in his 15-year career as a journalist at the Far Eastern Economic Review, Kaye takes the time in this account of his adventures as a China correspondent to devote long passages to rarely noted attributes of the country, from the fragrance of Beijing's subway system to the gastronomic sensations of yak fat. These digressions, while at times meandering, are redeemed by Kaye's ample knowledge of China and his childlike excitement over his subject. Kaye's edifying narrative can, during a brief train ride to Xian, the middle kingdom's ancient capital, entertainingly skim across a range of subjects throughout China's long, complicated history. The book's most revealing observations come not from Kaye, but from the people he speaks and travels with across China, a diverse cast of characters that includes a reincarnated lama, a Shaanxi cop, a fast-talking city lawyer and a die-hard Communist revolutionary. Among them, his travel companions have seen China's recent revolution and reform from significantly different perspectives-upper- and lower-class, rural and urban-and Kaye's record of their experiences is valuable. His deftness with the Chinese language, helped in part by his Taiwanese wife's occasional stint as translator (she is also the book's illustrator), enables him to capture subtle insights into his interlocutors' personalities and motivations. This allows Kaye to capture the conflicts and contradictions of a country that is so often depicted as a teeming, homogenous mass.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0374299986
• ISBN 13: 9780374299989
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480
• Illustrator: Mei-lang Hsu