The time is 1944. The setting is East Asia in flames. The characters are: Philip Baldwin, a New England major with his first command -- a tough and surly American demolition unit isolated in the great retreat of that turbulent year; Su-piao, a strong and beautiful Chinese woman educated in America; and Kwan, a frosty Chinese colonel who loves his country but must help ravish it. The story of their adventures in one violent week marks Theodore H. White's emergence as a major novelist.

The Mountain Road

Theodore H. White

EastBridge, a nonprofit corporation

The report of the Moscow Trade Expedition to Mongolia was published in Moscow by the main sponsor and organizer of the expedition, P.P. Riabushinskii. Traveling throughout northern and western Mongolia in the summer of 1910, the expedition gathered a wealth of information on trade routes, trading centers, the perceived threat to Russian trade posed by Chinese mercantile competition, and the daily lives of the Mongols, themselves. This document ranks among the best travel accounts of Mongolia written by foreigners from the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. It gives the reader a minutely detailed account of Mongolia in its final years before autonomy (1911-1919) and revolution (1921) reordered the entire social, political, and economic landscape. The seventy-three Moscow merchants who jointly underwrote the expedition s costs were in search of new export markets for Russian textiles and other manufactured products as well as scouting Mongolia as a source for unprocessed raw materials woolens, hides, and the like.

Pages From the Past: The 1910 Moscow Trade Expedition to Mongolia

Elizabeth Endicott (translator)

This is the biography of an American woman in China. It is the life story of Pearl Buck's mother. Everything in it is true except the names of the people are changed. Much of it the author learned from her mother's lips and diaries; the rest from her own observation. Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker's (Carie's in the book) childhood was passed happily in the hills of West Virginia, from which she went, the bride of a missionary, to spend a rigorous life in the interior of China. There, with warmth and vigor and understanding, she taught and served a strange people, spending her strength upon them. Of the seven children she bore, only three would grow up; only one, the author, was born in America, in the stately house which, to the exiled mother, was forever home. But even in a far country, the dauntless woman made an American home with an American garden and held always before herself and her children the bright remembrance that they were American and in the face of all danger and grief and bewilderment kept to the end a flaming spirit and a stout heart.

The Exile: Portrait of an American Mother

PEARL S. BUCK

This is the biography of an American missionary in China. It is the life story of Pearl Buck's father. Only the names of the people are changed. Absalom Sydenstricker (1852-1931) (renamed Andrew in the book) was the eighth of nine children born to a Presbyterian farming family in what would become West Virginia. At 22, Sydenstricker left home to complete high school. He went on to graduate from Washington and Lee College and Union Theological Seminary in Richmond. His resulting honors degrees were in classical languages. In 1879, just prior to seminary graduation, he was accepted by the Southern Presbyterian Mission Board to be sent out to China. A marriage was arranged, he was wed just after graduation, and a month later the couple was on their way to China.  Sydenstricker would serve in twenty missions spread all over China during his career. His background in languages and his exposure to many regional forms of spoken Mandarin molded his approach to mission work and, indeed, led him to insist that the bible, hymnals, and tracts be translated into popular Mandarin instead of the scholarly classical Chinese used by Western missionaries for more than a half-century in order to reach the common people with the gospel. Sydenstricker was unique among bible translators due to his command of Greek and Hebrew as well as his insistence on readability for the average Chinese Christian. He had a running feud with the official translators whom he blamed for the poor state of Christianity in China. While spectacularly unsuccessful against those official translators, his work heavily influenced the bible in use in China today. Modern scholarship has shifted away from studying individuals to focus on broad movements within the missionary community such as liberalism, anti-opium activities, or women missionaries. While these inquiries can be important and helpful, a look into personalities like Sydenstricker reminds us that there were missionaries of immense influence within their often gigantic mission fields who are not so easily classified. Sydenstricker was a contradictory and irascible man, isolated from the rest of the missionary community, but he was also a man of stern convictions and complex personality sufficient reason to look again into the lives of individuals in order to gain understanding of today's Chinese church. ...freely adapted from Jost O. Zetzsche in The Missionary Kaleidoscope

Fighting Angel

Local Politics in Rural Taiwan under Dictatorship and Democracy

History

J. Bruce Jacobs

Asia

In the 1920s, three adventurous and determined British women missionaries traveled along China's old Silk Road to gossip the Gospel in the Muslim regions of northwestern China. As this ground-breaking biography of Mildred Cable and the sisters Eva and Francesca French illustrates, their dedicated service in the Gobi Desert as members of the China Inland Mission (CIM) was only one aspect of these three unconventional women's lives. 
The Trio as they became known, advocated (and personified) equality for women in mission service; they denounced the British opium trade in China through their writings; and on home leaves, they wrote and published books that, in their lifetimes, brought them wide acclaim, honors, and influence as travelers, writers, and popular public speakers. Ultimately, the collaboration between Francesca French and Mildred Cable produced over 20 books, including Mildred Cable's renowned travel classic, The Gobi Desert. They were honored by several learnéd societies, receiving the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial medal of the Royal Central Asia Society (predecessor to the Royal Society for Asian Affairs) and the Livingstone medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. 
In this detailed and carefully researched account, Linda Benson reveals three extraordinary lives while providing fresh insight into the role of European women in the China mission field, the impact of warlord politics in Gansu and Xinjiang, and the lives of Muslim women in the far Asian northwest.

Across China's Gobi: The lives of Evangeline French, Mildred Cable, and Francesca French of the China Inland Mission

Linda K. Benson

Sun and Li interviewed 21 young Chinese movie-makers on a variety of challenges facing them as cinema gradually emerges from the PRC's long-standing censorship restrictions. Assembled by theme, the reader experiences a sense of eavesdropping on an open discussion between with these notable film directors. Includes biographical sketches (with color photos) of each participating director together with their filmographies.

Lights! Camera! Kai Shi!: In Depth Interviews with China's New Generation of Movie Directors

Shaoyi Sun

Li, Xun

Desaix Anderson was the first American charge d'affairs to Vietnam when diplomatic relations were reestablished in 1995 after a hiatus of almost twenty years. His role was to meet, analyse, report on, and influence the policy-level leaders of Vietnam as well as those officials responsible for executing those policies. His insights into the Vietnamese leadership and their thinking are a key feature of this book.

An American in Hanoi: America's Reconciliation with Vietnam (Signature Books)

Politics & Social Sciences

Desaix Anderson

Politics & Government

From the children of a dwarf whose house is torn down by the government to a young man selling his blood for money, the first-person narrators of the stories collected in The Voice of the Governor-General and Other Stories of Modern Korea take us into the heart of turbulent twentieth-century Korean history. This history includes colonization by the Japanese, the devastation of the Korean War, and a program of rapid industrialization that exacted the heaviest sacrifice from those already at the economic and political margins of society. 
The title story, chillingly told in the voice of the former Japanese governor-general of Korea who dreams of the day when the Japanese empire will flourish again, is a disturbingly acute diagnosis of a society in transition. Throughout these stories we witness the reality of division in Korea and the alienation of man in a society of machines in parallel tales of displaced old men. We experience powerful accounts, from the inside, of people whose lives have been overlooked in the drive for progress. A sense of aloofness in one story contrasts with the bitter humor of another, highlighting the despair of the survivors. This volume is a startling blend of satire, realism, and comedy in the twentieth century. 
"The works [of these authors], as expressions of society in the pangs of modernization and industrialism, are indispensable for understanding modern Korean literature as well as modern Korean history, and also present exemplary case studies for many other societies under the compounded pressure of dictatorship, capital industrialism and imperialism throughout the world.

The Voice of the Governor-General and Other Stories of Modern Korea

Cho, Se-hŭi

Hwang, Suk-Young

Chun, Kyung-Ja

Yoon Hueng-Gil

Choi In-Hoon

Literature & Fiction

Four Hundred Million Customers (1937) is a collection of humorous essays and piquant anecdotes underpinned by well-informed insight and highlighted by witty drawings by G. Sapojnikoff. Like a bowl of salted peanuts, these vignettes make you want more. The book was welcomed on its publication as the most entertaining and instructive introduction to the rapidly modernizing people of the new China and their resilient customs. While it has been taught in recent years at the Harvard Business School, the book — or at least its title — has been cited much more than read, usually to illustrate American illusions about the China market. Yet the book has lost none of its still perceptive insights into China, which is now more than triple four hundred million. 
Crow, living in Shanghai [in the early twentieth century], wrote in a bemused manner about city dwellers. [While] Crow’s book was of little value to the China watcher of the 1950s and 1960s … once Chinese reform and opening took off after 1978, the clever city dwellers that Crow described in the 1930s are a far better guide to the China of today than [Edgar] Snow’s revolutionaries or [Pearl] Buck’s peasants. 
I have a former student, a successful businessman, who opened a factory in Shanghai a few months ago. On his reading stand he keeps a copy of Four Hundred Million Customers. ‘No other book,’ he said, ‘including many more contemporary works on the Chinese economy, provides as much insight into the business environment I face. And it helps me keep my sense of humor as I face the frustrations of doing business in China.’ No need to repeat the wonderful stories and phrases found in the book. Enjoy. —from the Introduction by Ezra F. Vogel

Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences--Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China and What They Taught Him (D'Asia Vu Reprint Library (Series).)

Carl Crow

Ezra F. Vogel

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the EastBridge, a nonprofit corporation publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by EastBridge, a nonprofit corporation