Saturday, December 29, 2007
China Dreams
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
My Book Suggestions
Probably my favorite (and also the one that I read most recently) is Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. It is a wonderful story about two very different women whose lives are bound together by nu shu or "women's writing." It is the only known language exclusively used by women in the entire world. This language was used at time when women in China were very isolated. This was their way of forming life-long friendships; they wrote on fans and other items so they could communicate without even meeting face to face. Eventually these two women do meet, but their friendship threatens to tear apart after a misunderstanding.
It is a beautifully written book that follows these two women throughout their lives: through childhood, marriage, children, and even death. It also has a very interesting (and graphic) description of how footbinding was done. I definitely recommend it if anyone is interested in women's life in China during the 19th century.
My next recommendations are two novels by Gail Tsukyama, Women of the Silk and it's follow-up The Language of Threads. Both are about Pei, a young girl from rural China who goes to work at a silk factory. Like many Chinese, even today, she sends her wages home to help support her parents. At the age of 16, she decides to dedicate her life to silk work instead of marrying. The story is about her experience working 12-hour days in the silk factory as well as the important relationships she forms with the other women in the factory. The Language of Threads picks up where Women of the Silk leaves off and we find Pei arriving in Hong Kong in the 1930s. She and an orphan named Ji Shen are fleeing the Imperial Japanese Army. Upon arrival, they settle into life with an elderly British woman named Mrs. Finch. Unfortunately, before long the Japanese catch up with them and begin their occupation of Hong Kong, while Pei is forced to find a way to survive against the odds.
These books are also well-done and provide insight into life in a factroy in China in the 1920s. It is also interesting to read about the Japanese occupation and how it affected people living in China at that time. If anyone is interested Tsukiyama has also written Night of Many Dreams about two sisters in Hong Kong, which I have not had a chance to read. She has also written about Japan.
Falling Leaves is Adeline Yen Mah's account of her childhood as an "unwanted daughter." After her mother dies giving birth to her, she is considered bad luck and shunned by her family. The story chronicles her life from the time she lived with her family and cruel step-mother to 1949 when the Red Army approached and she is sent away to boarding school to her life today. Through it all she learns to excel at school and dream of the better life that she eventually achieves. It is a tough read, but a good story. It is written with honesty and candor. This book is also called Chinese Cinderella.
Finally, I'm sure many have read The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. This was also made into a movie in 1993. It tells the story of eight women, four mothers and four daughters, who are Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco. It is a sort of clash of traditional Chinese meets American ways as the Chinese-born mothers try to understand their American-born daughters and vice versa. The book is written in a sort of short story format as it goes from family to family, daughter to mother back to daughter. I originally read the book for a class and we split up the chapters by family and read them that way. The book is good no matter what way you read it and as with the rest of the books I am recommending, they are about the relationships of women.
I hope that if you are reading this you will pick up one of these five books.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
The Elephant and the Dragon
The Elephant and the Dragon chronicles China and India’s return to economic dominance over the last few decades. The book begins by telling the histories of China and India, focusing on the roles that Chairman Mao and Mahatma Gandhi played in shaping the China and India we see today. Mao plunged China into years of isolation from the world, with its people poor and starving in the name of communism. Although the communist party is still officially in charge today, thanks to Deng Xiaoping, China’s emergent leader after Mao’s death in 1976. China now resembles more of a capitalist state than anything truly communist. As for India, it has two ghosts of its postcolonial past. The first is Gandhi, who is known as India’s “Father of a Nation.” His anti-industrialization along with Jawaharlal Nehru’s socialism “caused India to withdraw from the world economy after winning its freedom from Britain in 1947” (Meredith 41). Nehru was India’s first prime minister after it became an independent nation. In the name of economic nationalism and self-sufficiency, Nehru cut off India from the rest of the world by making export and import difficult and expensive.
Meredith takes the reader from the dark days of China and India’s withdraw from the world stage to today’s blue-collar work in China and white-collar work in India. Although these two countries are often compared, Meredith argues that they are actually forming “complementary links” as the companies of the world take advantage of what is known as the “disassembly line.” What this means is multinational companies are hiring India’s white-collar works to support the blue-collar work done in China. China is thought of as “the factory of the world,” while India, with its restricting regulations excels as the “back office” of the world. This highlights a big difference between the two nations, something both may have to reassess in the future. India in particular faces a growing work force, which could eventually mean more people and not enough jobs. China, on the other hand, has a graying workforce. Because of their one-child laws, young Chinese workers face what they call the 1:2:4 problem: one person supporting their parents and grandparents with no siblings to help. China, like India, will need to create more jobs or face spending more to support retirees to keep its people out of poverty.
As the book moves out of the past and present of these two countries, Meredith turns to discussing what the future may hold for the United States as China and India continue to gain power. We may be seeing a world with not one, but three superpowers as both China and India quietly upgrade their military. While the United States military is still considered the most powerful in the world, controlling the oceans and the skies, China intends to change all that. And after they shot down a satellite, the United States took notice. India has nuclear power, which the United States currently supports as a way to get power, while lessening India’s pollution. However, this also means that both India and its volatile neighbor Pakistan have nuclear weapons. Our world today is the most unstable it has been in decades.
Although Meredith asserts that the United States is still the best at the end of the book, there are some important warnings throughout the book for the United States and its citizens that do not necessarily follow this view. China and India’s military modernization is one warning. Both countries have the ability to create a stronger military than the United States. Although our spending far exceeds that of any other country, China and India have a far greater population. In just a few years, both will have modernized their equipment, meaning the United States must keep up its military innovations to compete.
Another warning that is very important as the world begins to realize the consequences of global warming is environmental issues. As China and India industrialize, they are creating more and more pollution. Meredith writes that out of the top twenty most polluted cities according to the World Health Organization all but two are in China and India. She proposes some solutions, such as investing in solar and wind power, arguing that despite the extra costs, it will still be worthwhile for multinational companies to move their factories to China. Unfortunately most factories already built are very polluting and China’s lax regulations don’t help matters.
The most important warning from this book is the fact that offshoring and globalization is not going away. Americans may not like having their jobs shipped overseas, but they are going to have to get used to it. There are people halfway across the world who are willing to do the same job for a fraction of our pay. What most American’s don’t realize is that they are contributing to offshoring by buying lots of cheap goods made in China without realizing that offshoring is what keeps those prices so low. America has to face facts that it has got to step it up to be competitive in this world. Unfortunately, this comes at a time when our education system is lacking, while China and India’s grows along with their number of college graduates.
Throughout the book, Meredith cites many statistics. She has obviously done a great deal of research, however, this was a hinderance to the book because there was an overload of statistics. She included statistics on literacy rates today, poverty rates of the past, and even about the future economies of China and India. There were so many statistics throughout the book that few of them really stuck with me. Her writing easily caught my attention and the information within it stayed with me. However, when there are more than ten different numbers in one paragraph comparing China, India, the United States and Europe, I found myself skimming through them and not really taking them in. The other problem I have with statistics is their unreliability. Anyone can skew statistics to say whatever they want. And countries, like China, with somewhat unstable governments are known to bend the facts, such as poverty rate. The statistics projecting the future were interesting, but the truth is no one really knows what is going to happen in the future.
Meredith is an award winning journalist, who works as a foreign correspondent for Forbes magazine. In this book, she takes the reader on a historical journey with well-researched information about China and India’s past, present and future. The book is well-written and easy to read. Her writing immediately grabbed my attention and kept me turning the pages to find out what she had to say next. Since China and India are so important to the global economy, the global environment and global politics, this book is an important read for anyone living in today’s globalized world.
