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The Jing Affair is Taiwan's standout Cold War novel, a page-turning action thriller describing the bloody resistance to a combined military coup and invasion.As American surveillance reports come in of troop build-ups near the Chinese coast, Taiwan's KMT leaders are seen gathering at a secret base in the mountains. With all signs pointing to an imminent betrayal of Taiwan to China by secret police chief General Jing, the call goes out to implement Contingency Plan S; long-dormant, pro-independence Taiwanese leaders and fighters assemble in the hills, while out in the Taiwan Strait aboard a U.S. Navy carrier, Taiwanese-born air force pilot Johnny Hsiao prepares for a daring undercover mission.War comes to Taiwan on land, sea, and air. Clashes between Chinese and U.S. forces threaten to escalate into full-blown war, while Taiwanese are pitched against fellow Taiwanese. And the old tiger flag of the Formosa Republic will once more fly proudly into battle.First published in 1965 under an alias, The Jing Affair is an audacious book. Dedicated to the victims of Taiwan's White Terror, it spares no punches. The senile puppet president - the "Old Man" in the story - is a barely disguised then-president Chiang Kai-shek. The villainous General Jing has significant overlap with Chiang Ching-kuo, whom some feared would sell Taiwan out to Beijing (secret unification talks had, in fact, been held).The identity of the author came to light with the publication of his daughter Danielle Flood's memoir The Unquiet Daughter. D.J. Spencer was James (Jim) Flood, a long-time Foreign Service officer with the U.S. State Department (1951 to 1974) who had first come to Asia as a soldier in the Second World War and stayed on working as a reporter. Flood had a deep knowledge of Asia, and was based in Taiwan during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1958. Flood's daughter makes a compelling case in her memoir that her parents were the inspiration for the main characters in Graham Greene's acclaimed 1955 novel The Quiet American.

Vibrant, modern, and drenched in history from centuries as a gateway to China, this garden city of two million is a hidden gem. When the author, Robert Barge, arrived in Xiamen to take up an engineering position, he was expecting a typical gray Chinese city; instead, what he found left such an impression that he was inspired to write this book, the first guide dedicated exclusively to Xiamen.Explore Xiamen's temples, markets, and old alleyways; stroll through gardens and traverse waterfront boardwalks; hike hills of subtropical forest for sweeping island views, and as night falls sample the street food around Zhongshan Road or watch the sunset over the mainland from seaside Haiwan Park; take a short ferry ride to Xiamen's crown jewel, the car-free island of Gulangyu, with its beautiful colonial buildings and eccentric museums, and step back in time to the treaty port days when Xiamen was known to the world as Amoy.Camphor Press' Xiamen City Guide covers all the top attractions, and much more; by going into detail that the big China guides can't, it takes travellers off the tourist trail to experience the color and life tucked away from the bright lights of the major tourist spots. The guide gives informative and honest advice on what to see and what might not be worth seeing and has tips on avoiding the crowds in what is a hugely popular destination for domestic Chinese tourists. It reveals whole neighborhoods hitherto ignored by other travel guides. With detailed sections on getting there and away, public transport, visa requirements and helpful Chinese phrases, the guide has the practical information covered. The Xiamen City Guide will save you time, stress, and money.Features of the guide: Detailed neighborhood maps Sample itineraries Up-to-date information (recent changes to transportation and visas have made pre-2017 guides obsolete) Easily assessed info the guide is made to be used on the road, with phone numbers, and addresses in Chinese that you can show a taxi driver or passer-by Dining and accommodation suggestions for all budgets

Destination Chungking is the fictionalized autobiography of best-selling writer Han Suyin. It tells the love story of a young Chinese couple during the turmoil of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Childhood friends Han Suyin, a medical student, and Tang Pao, an officer in the Kuomintang Army, cross paths in England and fall in love. Returning to China to take part in the resistance, they marry in October 1938 in the city of Hankow on the eve of its capture by Japanese forces. Separated and reunited during an epic retreat across China to the wartime capital of Chungking (Chongqing) far up the Yangtze River, the couple will find their love and patriotism tested. Written and published as the war still raged and Chungking continued to be heavily bombed the book is also a story of the idealistic couple's love for China, an homage to the good humour and persistence of the Chinese people.Destination Chungking is a stunning debut from a young woman writing in her third language. Han Suyin (19162012), born Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou, was a Chinese-Flemish novelist and historian who explored the contact and conflict between East and West in her fiction, a reflection of her own mixed heritage. Her most famous work is A Many-Splendoured Thing, a bestseller when it was released in 1952 (though some critics such as Kirkus Reviews considered it inferior to Destination Chungking), and which was later made into the film Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1956).

Deep within the heart of China, far from the glamour of Shanghai and Beijing, lies the Chinese every-city of Huaishi. This worker's paradise of smog and concrete is home to Party Member Yang Wei, a mediocre man in a mediocre job. His content life of bureaucratic monotony is shattered by an encounter with the advanced consumer goods he has long been deprived of. Aided by the cynical and malicious advice of an unlikely mentor, Yang Wei embarks on a journey of greed, corruption, and murder that takes him to the diseased underbelly of Chinese society.Will Yang Wei achieve his ambition of promotion to the mysterious eighth floor? Will he win the love of his beautiful but materialistic colleague, Rainy? And will his penis stop telling him to eat at fast-food restaurants? Just how far will Yang Wei go to achieve his pursuit of wealth, glory, and a better car?Party Members is a bleak and black comedic fantasy about a world where to get rich is glorious, no matter who gets hurt in the process. Designer handbags, sex, karaoke, and shady property deals combine to paint a picture of modern China unlike anything seen before.

Little known today, Instructions for Chinese Women and Girls has a storied place in Chinese history as the first educational text for women and a standard reference for them from the first century AD all the way into the nineteenth. Polymath author Ban Zhao was perhaps China's greatest female scholar. A writer, historian, mathematician, and astronomer, she was also a tutor to the ladies of the imperial court and a close confidant of Empress Deng. Although Ban Zhao completed a monumental historical tome on the Western Han dynasty, she would be best remembered for this slighter work a short handbook of female etiquette in which she advises submissiveness in order to achieve household harmony. A kind of women's Art of War, there is more yielding than winning in the guidebook, but at least Ban Zhao was a pioneer in asserting that girls should be educated.Instructions for Chinese Girls and Women is an easy, enjoyable read. It contains passages preaching subservience that will make the modern reader cringe and/or laugh, but there is interesting nuance there for readers with an open mind.The husband commands, the wife obeys;Yet let there be mutual grace and love;There are timeworn, universal complaints:The present generation's children are very bad;They have learned nothing.And there are humorous warnings against immoral immodesty:Imitate not those rude women who with confusion eat, drink, and talk;Drinking wine until crazy, they shamefully vomit their food;In this state going home, before reaching their house, many shameful, rude acts will they do.This Camphor Press edition has illustrations and a new introduction from Susan Blumberg-Kason, author of the memoir Good Chinese Wife.

Peng Ming-min was imprisoned by the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan during the White Terror era for subversion. He was released from prison but still under house arrest when he evaded his minders and fled the country, first to Sweden and then to the US, where he led the fight for democracy in his homeland. He returned to stand as a candidate in the first democratic presidential elections in 1996. A Taste of Freedom is his incredible story.

Until the early twentieth century, Taiwan was one of the wildest places in Asia. Its coastline was known as a mariners' graveyard, the mountainous interior was the domain of headhunting tribes, while the lowlands were a frontier area where banditry, feuding, and revolts were a way of life. Formosan Odyssey captures the rich sweep of history through the eyes of Westerners who visited and lived on the island from missionaries, adventurers, lighthouse keepers, and Second World War PoWs, to students coming to study martial arts. It finishes with the story of Taiwan's economic miracle, the political transition from police state to vibrant democracy, and its continuing stand-off with China.The author's travels, made around the island in the wake of the devastating 921 earthquake, and his experiences from five years of living in a small town, provide an intimate picture of modern Taiwan.The island is a storehouse of Chinese and indigenous cultures, a fascinating mix of the new and the traditional, and likewise Formosan Odyssey is a smorgasbord of delights that both the general reader and any ';old Asia hand' will find informative and amusing.

Vern Sneider's A Pail of Oysters is the most important English-language novel ever written about Taiwan. Yet despite critical acclaim, this exciting and controversial book has long been unavailable to readers. Unlike Sneider's previous novel, the humorous bestseller The Teahouse of the August Moon, this 1953 publication has a dark, menacing tone. Set against the political repression and poverty of the White Terror era, A Pail of Oysters tells the moving story of nineteen-year-old villager Li Liu and his quest to recover his family's stolen kitchen god. Li Liu's fate becomes entwined with that of American journalist Ralph Barton, who, in trying to report honestly about KMT rule of the island, investigates the situation beyond the propaganda, learns of a massacre, and is drawn into the world of the Formosan underground.The Chicago Sunday Tribune said, ';This book will hold the reader enthralled to the very end and will probably give him more information about this unhappy spot than he has gathered before. It will certainly not win converts to the side of the generalissimo.' Indeed, the novel made enemies. Banned in Taiwan, in the United States it was denounced by Chiang Kai-shek's supporters: the powerful China Lobby. Anecdotal evidence suggests and Sneider himself suspected that his book was subject to suppression even in the United States by pro-KMT agents.A Pail of Oysters is a landmark work from a time when novels were often seen as a moral force. But politics and historical importance aside, A Pail of Oysters is simply a good story well told. In the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, ';The novel is touching, tragic and oddly gay sometimes in spite of this; a testimony to the stubbornly optimistic human spirit.'This Camphor Press edition comes with a new introduction and a brief biography of the author.

The year is 1624. In southwestern Taiwan the Dutch establish a trading settlement; in Nagasaki a boy is born who will become immortalized as Ming dynasty loyalist Koxinga. Lord of Formosa tells the intertwined stories of Koxinga and the Dutch colony from their beginnings to their fateful climax in 1662. The year before, as Ming China collapsed in the face of the Manchu conquest, Koxinga retreated across the Taiwan Strait intent on expelling the Dutch. Thus began a nine-month battle for Fort Zeelandia, the single most compelling episode in the history of Taiwan. The first major military clash between China and Europe, it is a tale of determination, courage, and betrayal a battle of wills between the stubborn Governor Coyett and the brilliant but volatile Koxinga. Although the story has been told in non-fiction works, these have suffered from a lack of sources on Koxinga as the little we know of him comes chiefly from his enemies.While adhering to the historical facts, author Joyce Bergvelt sympathetically and intelligently fleshes out Koxinga. From his loving relationship with his Japanese mother, estrangement from his father (a Chinese merchant pirate), to his struggle with madness, we have the first rounded, intimate portrait of the man.Dutch-born Bergvelt draws on her journalism background, Chinese language and history studies, and time in Taiwan, to create an irresistible panorama of memorable characters caught up in one of the seventeenth century's most fascinating dramas.