Bamboo Shoots After The Rain - Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of Taiwan (Paperback, New Ed)

Fourteen stories, translated from Chinese, that are as much a reflection of the changing status of women in Chinese society in the 20th century as of the range of their literary accomplishments during the same period. Dividing the writers into generations - older, middle, and younger - the editors have chosen pieces that they consider best represent each of them. The stories by the older generation ("Looking Back Through Women's Eyes") are mostly accounts of the constraints that traditional Chinese society imposed on women. Stories like "The Chinon" and "In Liu Village" describe, respectively, a wife's anguish when her husband takes a concubine, and the relentless demands, even cruelties, of a woman's in-laws. As the old China was supplanted by communism and a new dispensation in Taiwan, the middle generation ("Challenging Boundaries and Affirming the Will") wrote stories that acknowledge female sexuality but also detail how the new institutions have affected women. And in this section is found the most accomplished story here, "Chairman Mao is a Rotten Egg," by Jo-hsi Chen, the well-known author of The Execution of Mayor Yin (1978). Responding to a rapidly changing society, the younger generation's stories are more experimental in style, and less specifically Chinese: married women work, teen-agers have sexual encounters, and aging parents go out on dates. Sometimes uneven in quality but always interesting in content: a collection that gives a vivid and detailed picture of women and women's evolving roles in a culture once notoriously repressive. A useful contribution. (Kirkus Reviews)

This remarkable anthology introduces the short fiction of 14 writers, major figures in the literary movements of three generations, who represent a range of class, ethnic, age, and political perspectives. It is filled with "unexpected gems," writes Scarlet Cheng in Belles Lettres, including Lin Hai-yin's story of a woman suffering under a feudal system that dominated Old China; Chiang Hsiao-yun's optimistic solutions to problems of the elderly in the rapidly changing Taiwan of the 1980; and in between, a dozen richly diverse stories of aristocrats, comrades, wices, concubines, children, mothers, sexuality, rape, female initiation, and the tensions between traditional and modern life. "This is not western feminism with an Asian accent," says Bloomsbury Review, "but a description of one culture's reality...The woman protagonists survive both despite and because of their existence in a changing Taiwan." This book includes biographical headnotes, an introduction that addresses the literary movements represented, and an extensive bibliography.

General

Imprint:	Feminist Press at The City University of New York
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	February 1993
First published:	1993
Editors:	Ann C. Carver • Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang
Dimensions:	220 x 142 x 19mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	232
Edition:	New Ed
ISBN-13:	978-1-55861-018-7
Categories:	Books Promotions
LSN:	1-55861-018-9
Barcode:	9781558610187

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