Flowers for Mei-Ling


Book Description

A Eurasian woman's tale of survival. Sent to a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution, Mei-Ling, the daughter of a Chinese professor and an Englishwoman escapes to Hong Kong and marries a Dutchman, only to find herself put to work in his call girl business in Amsterdam. When he dies she becomes wealthy, moves to Montreal with her daughter and marries a professor.




Lucky Girl


Book Description

In a true story of family ties, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades.In 1974, a baby girl from Taiwan arrived in America, the newly adopted child of a loving couple in Michigan. Mei-Ling Hopgood had an all-American upbringing, never really identifying with her Asian roots or harboring a desire to uncover her ancestry. She believed that she was lucky to have escaped a life that was surely one of poverty and misery, to grow up comfortable with her doting parents and brothers. Then, when she's in her twenties, her birth family comes calling. Not the rural peasants she expected, they are a boisterous, loving, bossy, complicated middle-class family who hound her daily by phone, fax, and letter, in a language she doesn't understand until she returns to Taiwan to meet them. As her sisters and parents pull her into their lives, claiming her as one of their own, the devastating secrets that still haunt this family begin to emerge. Spanning cultures and continents, "Lucky Girl" brings home a tale of joy and regret, hilarity, deep sadness, and great discovery as the author untangles the unlikely strands that formed her destiny.




How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm


Book Description

"The book is breezy and entertaining and Hopgood is charmingly self-deprecating about her own mothering of the formidable Sofia, who emerges as a sassy character in her own right."—Boston Globe A tour of global practices that will inspire American parents to expand their horizons (and geographical borders) and learn that there’s more than one way to diaper a baby. Mei-Ling Hopgood, a first-time mom from suburban Michigan—now living in Buenos Aires—was shocked that Argentine parents allow their children to stay up until all hours of the night. Could there really be social and developmental advantages to this custom? Driven by a journalist’s curiosity and a new mother’s desperation for answers, Hopgood embarked on a journey to learn how other cultures approach the challenges all parents face: bedtimes, potty training, feeding, teaching, and more. Observing parents around the globe and interviewing anthropologists, educators, and child-care experts, she discovered a world of new ideas. The Chinese excel at potty training, teaching their wee ones as young as six months old. Kenyans wear their babies in colorful cloth slings—not only is it part of their cultural heritage, but strollers seem outright silly on Nairobi’s chaotic sidewalks. And the French are experts at turning their babies into healthy, adventurous eaters. Hopgood tested her discoveries on her spirited toddler, Sofia, with some enlightening results. This intimate and surprising look at the ways other cultures raise children offers parents the option of experimenting with tried and true methods from around the world and shows that there are many ways to be a good parent.




The Achilles Battle Fleet


Book Description

In what is sure to be a new classic in the genre of weaponized space epics, Brendan Wilson gives us a glimpse into a future teeming with impossible technologies, international intrigue and a power struggle to send your imagination reeling.Alliance officers Lieutenant Mei Ling Lee and Admiral Jay Chambers are navigating their starship flotilla back to the blue planet from the Achilles Nine frontier, only to meet with a dark destiny. The enemy looms as a triumphant cast of characters emerges to combat on multiple fronts both the juggernaut of terror inspired by neigh-unconquerable volatile quantum hybrid clone technology spawned from an internal spy network, and the hierarchy of brutal galactic martial law, which threatens to tear the Alliance asunder.With clean battle-ready authority, Wilson extracts a forceful and challenging stand-alone story to explore honor and valor high above a far-future Earth.




The Last Empress


Book Description

With the beautiful, powerful, and sexy Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the center of one of the great dramas of the twentieth century, this is the story of the founding of modern China, starting with a revolution that swept away more than 2,000 years of monarchy, followed by World War II, and ending in the eventual loss to the Communists and exile in Taiwan. An epic historical tapestry, this wonderfully wrought narrative brings to life what Americans should know about China -- the superpower we are inextricably linked with -- the way its people think and their code of behavior, both vastly different from our own. The story revolves around this fascinating woman and her family: her father, a peasant who raised himself into Shanghai society and sent his daughters to college in America in a day when Chinese women were kept purposefully uneducated; her mother, an unlikely Methodist from the Mandarin class; her husband, a military leader and dogmatic warlord; her sisters, one married to Sun Yat-sen, the George Washington of China, the other to a seventy-fifth lineal descendant of Confucius; and her older brother, a financial genius. This was the Soong family, which, along with their partners in marriage, was largely responsible for dragging China into the twentieth century. Brilliantly narrated, this fierce and bloody drama also includes U.S. Army General Joseph Stilwell; Claire Chennault, head of the Flying Tigers; Communist leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai; murderous warlords; journalists Henry Luce, Theodore White, and Edgar Snow; and the unfortunate State Department officials who would be purged for predicting (correctly) the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. As the representative of an Eastern ally in the West, Madame Chiang was befriended -- before being rejected -- by the Roosevelts, stayed in the White House for long periods during World War II, and charmed the U.S. Congress into giving China billions of dollars. Although she was dubbed the Dragon Lady in some quarters, she was an icon to her people and is certainly one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century.




Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography Volume 4


Book Description

The Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography (1979-2015) provides a riveting new way to understand twenty-first-century China and a personal look at the changes that have taken place since the Reform and Opening Up era started in 1979. One hundred key individuals from this period were selected by an international group of experts, and the stories were written by more than 70 authors in 14 countries. The authors map the paths taken by these individuals-some rocky, some meandering, some fateful-and in telling their stories give contemporary Chinese history a human face. The editors have included-with the advice of myriad experts around the world-not only the life stories of politicians and government officials, who play a crucial role in the development of the country, but the stories of cultural figures including, film directors, activists, writers, and entrepreneurs from the mainland China, Hong Kong, and also from Taiwan. The "Greater China" that comes through in this volume has diverse ideas and identities. It is often contradictory, sometimes fractious, and always full of creative human complexity. Some of the lives rendered here are heroic. Some are tragic, and many are inspirational. Some figures come in for trenchant criticism, and others are celebrated with a sense of wonder and awe. Like previous volumes of the Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography, this volume includes a range of appendices, including a pronunciation guide, a bibliography, and a timeline of key events.




Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Novel


Book Description

An uproarious debut that lays bare the complicated generational relationships of Chinese American women. Raucous twin sisters Moonie and Mei Ling Wong are known as the “double happiness” Chinese food delivery girls. Each day they load up a “crappy donkey-van” and deliver Americanized (“bad”) Chinese food to homes throughout their southern California neighborhood. United in their desire to blossom into somebodies, the Wong girls fearlessly assert their intellect and sexuality, even as they come of age under the care of their dominating, cleaver-wielding grandmother from Hong Kong. They transform themselves from food delivery girls into accomplished women, but along the way they wrestle with the influence and continuity of their Chinese heritage. Marilyn Chin’s prose waxes and wanes between satire and metaphorical lyric, referencing classical Chinese tales and ghost stories that are at turns sensual, lurid, hilarious, shocking, and surreal.




Madame Chiang Kai-shek


Book Description

The first biography of one of the most controversial and fascinating women of the twentieth century. Beautiful, brilliant, and captivating, Madame Chiang Kai-shek seized unprecedented power during China’s long and violent civil war. She passionately argued against Chinese Communism in the international arena and influenced decades of Sino-American relations and modern Chinese history. Raised in one of China’s most powerful families and educated at Wellesley College, Soong Mayling went on to become wife, chief adviser, interpreter, and propagandist to Nationalist leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. She sparred with international leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt, and impressed Westerners and Chinese alike with her acumen, charm, and glamour. But she was also decried as a manipulative Dragon Lady,” and despised for living in American-style splendor while Chinese citizens suffered under her husband’s brutal oppression. The result of years of extensive research in the United States and abroad, and written with access to previously classified CIA and diplomatic files, Madame Chiang Kai-shek objectively evaluates one of the most powerful and fascinating women of the twentieth century. “Li brilliantly analyzes a fearless and profoundly conflicted woman of extraordinary force.” —Booklist




Transforming the Internal World and Attachment


Book Description

Transforming the Internal World and Attachment reviews and discusses four theories about what makes psychotherapy effective across forms of treatment, treatment settings, and diagnostic categories: mindfulness, mentalization, psychological mindedness, and the attachment relationship. Geoff Goodman offers some provisional hypotheses about therapeutic effectiveness and suggests some ways of testing these hypotheses empirically, using sophisticated assessment instruments that measure psychotherapy process and outcome. Goodman suggests that the therapeutic community's survival depends on submitting its craft to empirical scrutiny before the pharmaceutical drug lords strip it away from us.




The World as Light


Book Description

Adi Da Samraj's exhibition at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007), Transcendental Realism, marks the first time his work is being shown to the public. The purpose of The World As Light is to provide an overview of his entire artistic oeuvre of the past forty years?accompanied by key statements he has made on his own art and on the artistic process in general. His art can be understood as an intensive investigation of the human condition?the condition of presumed existence as a ?self? in the midst of a world that is ?not-self?. Adi Da's art is meant to call into question the most basic presumptions of ordinary human life: the ?fact? of existing as an independent ?self?, the ?fact? of every ?self? being separate from every other ?self?, the ?fact? of the ?self? being separate from the world of ?everything else?. Indeed, Adi Da intends his art to communicate the profundity that is known when all presumptions of ?separateness? are relinquished.