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Our Book Club
China-Related Non-Fiction Asian-American Non-Fiction Chinese and Chinese-American Fiction
China Adoption General Adoption Parenting Children's Books
Fiction
A red diamond indicates that a book has
received at least one Maydeebug "stamp of approval." If you would like
to add a book to add to the list, please e-mail Kerri at
buonacosa@yahoo.com.
Title: The Good Earth (Good Earth Trilogy,
v.1)
Author: Pearl Buck
Description Wang Lung,
rising from humble Chinese farmer to wealthy landowner, gloried in
the soil he worked. He held it above his family, even above his gods.
But soon, between Wang Lung and the kindly soil that sustained him,
came flood and drought, pestilence and revolution....Through this one
Chinese peasant and his children, Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck
traces the whole cycle of life, its terrors, its passion, its
persistent ambitions and its rewards. Her brilliant
novel—beloved by millions of readers throughout the
world—is a universal tale of the destiny of men.
Title: Sons (Good Earth Trilogy, v.2)
Author: Pearl Buck
Description Second in the
trilogy that began with The Good Earth, Buck's classic and starkly
real tale of sons rising against their honored fathers tells of the
bitter struggle to the death between the old and the new in China.
Revolutions sweep the vast nation, leaving destruction and death in
their wake, yet also promising emancipation to China's oppressed
millions who are groping for a way to survive in a modern age.
Title: A House Divided (Good Earth Trilogy,
v.3)
Author: Pearl Buck
Description A HOUSE
DIVIDED is the third volume of Pearl S. Buck's trilogy that began
with THE GOOD EARTH and SONS--a powerful portrayal of China in the
midst of revolution. "A HOUSE DIVIDED is built around China in
revolution and the conflict between the young and old generations . .
. a rich an illuminating book.--The New York Times.
Title: Pavilion of Women
Author: Pearl Buck
Description From the
author of The Good Earth comes the story of Madame Wu, a woman whose
surprising decision to retire from married life and select a
concubine for her husband upsets her extended household. "A
searching, adult study of women written with high seriousness and
sympathy." - The New York Times Book Review
Title: The Kitchen God's Wife
Author: Amy Tan
Description Winnie and
Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years.
Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose
everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to
tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terible
truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her
life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other
places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and
desperate events tha led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949.
Title: The Joy Luck Club
Author: Amy Tan
Description In 1949, four
Chinese women begin meeting in San Francisco for fun. Nearly 40 years
later, their daughters continue to meet as the Joy Luck Club. Their
stories ultimately display the double happiness that can be found in
being both Chinese and American
Title: The 100 Secret Senses
Author: Amy Tan
Description Set in San
Francisco and in a remote village of southern China, this is a tale
of American pragmatism shaken, and soothed, by Chinese ghosts. What
proof of love do we seek between mother and daughter, among sisters,
lovers, and friends? What are its boundaries and failings? Can love
go beyond 'Until death do us part?' And if so, which aspects haunt us
like regretful ghosts? In 1962, Olivia, nearly six years old, meets
Kwan, her adult half sister from China, for the first time. Olivia's
neglectful mother, who in pursuing a new marriage can't provide the
attention her daughter needs, finds Kwan to be a handy caretaker. In
the bedroom the sisters share, Kwan whispers secrets about ghosts and
makes Olivia promise never to reveal them. Out of both fright and
resentment, Olivia betrays her sister -- with terrible consequences.
From then on she listens to Kwan's stories and pretends to believe
them. Thirty years pass, and Olivia is about to divorce her husband,
Simon, after a lengthy marriage. She is certain he has never given up
his love for a former girlfriend, who died years before. Kwan and her
ghosts believe otherwise, and they provide Olivia with ceaseless
advice and pleas to reconsider. But Olivia has long since dismissed
the ghosts of her childhood and the wacky counsel of her sister. Just
as Kwan anticipates, fate intervenes and takes her, Olivia, and Simon
to China. In the village where Kwan grew up, Olivia confronts the
tangible evidence of what she has always presumed to be her sister's
fantasy of the past. And there, she finds the proof that love
endures, and comes to understand what logic ignores, what you can
know only through the hundred secret senses.
Title: The Bonesetter's Daughter
Author: Amy Tan
Description Set in
contemporary San Francisco and in a Chinese village where Peking Man
is unearthed, The Bonesetter's Daughter is an excavation of the human
spirit: the past, its deepest wounds, its most profound hopes. This
is the story of LuLing Young, who searches for the name of her
mother, the daughter of the famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the
Mountain. The story conjures the pain of broken dreams, the power of
myths, and the strength of love that enables us to recover in memory
what we have lost in grief.
Title: Waiting
Author: Ha Jin
Description This is the
story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the
conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through
the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every
move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart.. "For more
than seventeen years this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in
love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in
the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family
chose for him when he was young - a humble and touchingly loyal
woman, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for a
divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and
family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can
ruin lives forever, Lin's passionate love is stretched ever more taut
by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a
divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be
different.. "Tracing these lives through their summer of decision and
beyond, Ha Jin vividly conjures the texture of daily life in a place
where the demands of human longing must contend with the weight of
centuries of custom.
Title: The Bridegroom
Author: Ha Jin
Description From the
National Book Award-winning author of Waiting, a new collection of
short fiction that confirms Ha Jin's reputation as a master
story-teller. Each of The Bridegroom's twelve stories -- three of
which have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Short
Stories -- takes us back to Muji City in contemporary China, the
setting of Waiting. It is a world both exotic and disarmingly
familiar, one in which Chinese men and women meet with small
epiphanies and muted triumphs, leavening their lives of quiet
desperation through subtle insubordination and sometimes crafty
resolve.
Title: In the Pond
Author: Ha Jin
Description National Book
Award-winner Ha Jin's arresting debut novel , In the Pond, is a
darkly funny portrait of an amateur calligrapher who wields his
delicate artist's brush as a weapon against the powerful party
bureaucrats who rule his provincial Chinese town. Shao Bin is a
downtrodden worker at the Harvest Fertilizer Plant by day and an
aspiring artist by night. Passed over on the list to receive a decent
apartment for his young family, while those in favor with the party's
leaders are selected ahead of him, Shao Bin chafes at his
powerlessness. When he attempts to expose his corrupt superiors by
circulating satirical cartoons, he provokes an escalating series of
merciless counterattacks that send ripples beyond his small
community. Artfully crafted and suffused with earthy wit, In the Pond
is a moving tale about humble lives caught up in larger social
forces.
Title: All Men Are Brothers
Author: Shui Hu Chuan, Translated
by Shi Nai'an and Pearl S. Buck
Description With an array
of colorful characters, this translation of the Chinese classic Shui
Hu Chuan chronicles the adventures of 108 bandits struggling to help
the emperor rid himself of the despotic prime minister.
Title: Balzac and the Little Chinese
Seamstress
Author: Sijie Dai, Translated by
Ina Rilke
Description Stories set
in China during the Cultural Revolution usually follow a trail of
human struggle and tragedy, but this little gem of a book spins magic
thread out of broken dreams. Already a best-seller in France and
slated for release in 19 countries, this novel is the story of two
whimsical young men ordered to the countryside for reeducation as a
result of their parents' political designation as "class enemies."
Assigned the revolting task of carrying buckets of excrement up a
hillside for the peasant farmers, the boys design a venue of
storytelling sessions and quickly earn the headman's leniency in
return. When they meet the local tailor's beautiful daughter, the
luminescent Little Seamstress, and discover a wealth of forbidden
Western books, life on the hillside takes a brighter turn. His book
is truly enchanting, written with the rhythm of a fable. Dai Sijie is
himself a survivor of that fateful time in China's history, yet he
incorporates delightful humor into sketching his innovative cast of
characters.