Chinese Life

The Secret of the Golden Flower is an ancient Chinese text, passed on for centuries, in which Taoist mystics reveal the path to true enlightenment. The first written version was believed to have originated with Lü Dongbin, a legendary scholar, poet, and spiritual master. Lü Dongbin was the founder of the School of the Golden Elixir of Life during the Tang dynasty. In the text, symbols for light represented awareness, which is normally directed outward toward externals.

A Chinese mother and daughter wrestle with the demons of their past. Lemei, once a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai and a journalist at a state newspaper, was involved in a brutal act of violence during the Tiananmen Square protests and lost all hope for her country. Her daughter, Lin, is a student at an American university, executing her mother's grand plan for her to become a true Westerner. Following China's meteoric rise, Lemei is slowly dragged into a nationalistic perspective that stuns Lin, leading to grave conflicts.

After years of hard work, Mia Tang finally gets to go on vacation with her family - to China! A total dream come true! Mia can't wait to see all her cousins and grandparents again, especially her cousin Shen. As she roams around Beijing, witnessing some of the big changes China's going through, Mia thinks about the changes in her own life.

Vivian Yin is dead. The first Chinese actress to win an Oscar, the trailblazing ingénue rose to fame in the eighties, only to disappear from the spotlight at the height of her career to live out the rest of her life as a recluse. Now her remaining family members are gathered for the reading of her will, and her daughters expect to inherit their childhood home: Vivian’s grand, sprawling, Southern California garden estate. But due to a last-minute change to the will, the house is passed on to another family instead—one that has suddenly returned after decades of estrangement.

The lessons taught by ancient Chinese philosophers surprisingly still apply, and they challenge our fundamental assumptions about how to lead a fulfilled, happy, and successful life. Self-discovery, it turns out, comes through looking outward, not inward. Power comes from holding back. Good relationships come from small gestures. Spontaneity comes from practice. And excellence comes from what you choose to do, not your "natural" abilities.

Live Well Live Long explores the wonderful Chinese tradition of nourishing life (yangsheng). Continuously developed over more than 25 centuries, it serves as a workshop manual for the care of the human body, mind, and spirit. Its teachings can help us improve our health and lengthen our lives through cultivating our mind, emotions, diet, exercise, sleep, sexual behaviour, and much more. And as this book reveals, these teachings are comprehensively backed up by the findings of modern lifestyle research.

A Chinese proverb says, "Falling leaves return to their roots." In Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph and courage in the face of despair. Adeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother dies giving birth to her. Life does not get any easier when her father remarries. She and her siblings are subjected to the disdain of her stepmother, while her stepbrother and stepsister are spoiled.

Sisterhood is difficult for Su and Emerald. Su leads a sheltered, moneyed life as the picture-perfect wife of a conservative politician in Singapore. Emerald is a nihilistic sugar baby in New York, living from whim to whim and using her charms to make ends meet. But they share a secret: once, they were snakes, basking under a full moon in Tang dynasty China. A thousand years later, their mysterious history is the only thing still binding them together.

Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) led the Republic of China for almost fifty years, starting in 1926. He was the architect of a new republican China, a hero of the Second World War, and a faithful ally of the United States. Simultaneously a Christian and a Confucian, Chiang dreamed of universal equality yet was a perfidious and cunning dictator responsible for the deaths of over 1.5 million innocent people. This critical biography is based on Chiang Kai-shek's unpublished diaries, his extensive personal files from the Russian archives, and the Russian files of his relatives, associates, and foes.

In his own time (701-762), Li Bai's poems - shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life - were never given their proper due by the official literary gatekeepers. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of court entertainers, tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty. The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it and whose ability to live, love, and mourn without reservation produced some of the most enduring verses.

The Power of Soul reveals divine soul secrets, wisdom, knowledge, and practices to transform the consciousness of humanity and all souls, and enlighten them in order to create love, peace, and harmony for humanity, Mother Earth, and all universes.

Shanghai, 1912. Violet Minturn is the privileged daughter of the American madam of the city's most exclusive courtesan house. But when the Ching dynasty is overturned, Violet is separated from her mother in a cruel act of chicanery and forced to become a "virgin courtesan." Half-Chinese and half-American, Violet grapples with her place in the worlds of East and West - until she is able to merge her two halves, empowering her to become a shrewd courtesan who excels in the business of seduction and illusion, though she still struggles to understand who she is.

几度情醉唐诗，几度梦回唐朝，唐诗中的唐朝，繁花如锦却又灾难深重，刚健理性却又缠绵多情，字字珠玉却也句句带血般的词句演绎出一代绝世风华……幾度情醉唐詩，幾度夢迴唐朝，唐詩中的唐朝，繁花如錦卻又災難深重，剛健理性卻又纏綿多情，字字珠玉卻也句句帶血般的詞句演繹出一代絕世風華……

Spend twenty-four hours with the ancient Chinese. Travel back to AD 17, during the fourth year of the reign of Wang Mang of the Han dynasty, a vibrant and innovative era full of conflicts and contradictions. But as different as the Han culture might have been to other great ancient civilizations, the inhabitants of ancient China faced the same problems as people have for time immemorial: earning enough money, coping with workplace dramas, and keeping your home in order.

In New York City, an art student finds an unexpected subject when she moves in with a grandmother from Xi’an, and boundaries are put into question. When a newlywed couple moves to Arizona, adapting to unfamiliar customs keeps their marriage from falling apart. A woman grapples with what it means to care for another, and the limits of that care, when her dying husband returns from Beijing years after abandoning her. And during a rainy summer in Texas, a visitor exposes the unspoken but unburiable history that binds two families together.

Sophie’s work on the Chinese booth at last year’s Rainbow Fair is a point of pride for her and her parents, even if Sophie and her best friend, Katie, think the whole thing is a little silly. Sophie's family is Hui, Chinese Muslim. The Muslim part is something she doesn't know much about. Her parents prefer to keep it private. So when it gets slipped to an overenthusiastic teacher that Sophie is Muslim, the only Muslim in her class, suddenly Sophie is in charge of debuting a booth representing the Islamic religion she doesn't practice, an assignment she is determined to keep secret.

Eighteen-year-old Shelley, born into a much-despised branch of the Zheng family in Yunnan Province and living in the shadow of his widowed father’s grief, dreams of bigger things. Buoyed by an exuberant heart and his cousin Deng’s tall tales about the United States, Shelley heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny, confident that any hurdles will be easily overcome by the awesome powers of the “Chinese groove,” a belief in the unspoken bonds between countrymen that transcend time and borders.

One of the most significant and popular books in the history of human thought, and China’s earliest philosophical classic, The Dao De Jing has served for millennia as a brilliant guide to living healthily and happily, to treating the Earth with respect, and to understanding our place in the cosmos. Renowned translator J. H. Huang has spent over two decades researching the Dao, resulting in the most accurate translation to date based on the oldest known transcripts of the text.

Deborah Fallows has spent a lot of her life learning languages and traveling around the world. But nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin - China's most common language - or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying learning the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering behavior and habits of its people, and its culture's conundrums.

Max helps his friend Lily and her family celebrate the Chinese New Year. Flowers, oranges, and special candy are all part of the fun!