USF Center for Asia Pacific Studies Winter Book Club
As the weather gets colder, it’s the perfect time to settle in on the sofa or your favorite chair with a good book. Need suggestions for a good book to read? Join the USF Center for Asia Pacific Studies for our Winter Book Club. We’ll provide the online link, the moderator, and the community of fellow readers interested in learning more about the Asia Pacific region; you provide the book. We had so much fun engaging with you all during our Summer Book Club that we’ve decided to meet up again this winter. All are welcome to join us. Reserve your spot today!
Meeting 1: Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China. By Jung Chang
Friday, January 8, 2021, 11:45 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Moderator: Melissa Dale, Ph.D., Executive Director and Associate Professor, Center for Asia Pacific Studies
This event is free and open to the USF community and the public.
To register: https://rsvp.usfca.edu/event/cfa84eeb-0da1-4529-b33f-d26419c8a682/summary
About BIG SISTER, LITTLE SISTER, RED SISTER: They were the most famous women in China. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the center of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history.Red Sister, Ching-ling, married the ‘Father of China’, Sun Yat-sen, and rose to be Mao’s vice-chair. Little Sister, May-ling, became Madame Chiang Kai-shek, first lady of pre-Communist Nationalist China and a major political figure in her own right. Big Sister, Ei-ling, became Chiang’s unofficial main adviser – and made herself one of China’s richest women.Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is a gripping story of love, war, intrigue, bravery, glamour and betrayal, which takes us on a sweeping journey from Canton to Hawaii to New York, from exiles’ quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meeting rooms in Moscow, and from the compounds of the Communist elite in Beijing to the corridors of power in democratic Taiwan. In a group biography that is by turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape twentieth-century China.
This book is available in paperback, kindle, and audio book formats.
Meeting 2: The Kite Family, by Lai-chu Hon (Author), Andrea Lingenfelter (Translator)
Friday, January 22, 2021, 11:45 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Moderator: Andrea Lingenfelter, Ph.D., writer and literary translator, adjunct faculty, USF MA in Asia Pacific Studies Program.
This event is free and open to the USF community and the public.
To register: https://rsvp.usfca.edu/event/21bc546b-c2c7-4577-ab74-bb9639781d30/summary
About The Kite Family (Muse, 2015):
A patient escapes from an asylum to spend his life as the perfect mannequin in a store display; a luckless man transforms himself into a chair so people can, literally, sit on him; after living alone is outlawed, a woman who resides quietly with her cat is assigned a role in an artificial “family.” These are just a few of the inhabitants of Hon Lai-chu’s stories, where surreal characters struggle to carve out space for freedom and individuality in an absurd world. The Chinese version of The Kite Family won the New Writer’s Novella first prize from Taiwan’s Unitas Literary Association, was selected as one of the Top 10 Chinese Novels Worldwide, and was awarded a Translation Grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.
This book is available in print and kindle editions.