1884353347     

Gifts to the Sad Country : Essays on the Chinese Diaspora / by Souchou Yao

1st ed. 2024.

Singapore : Springer Nature Singapore [2024.] ; Singapore : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan [2024.], 2024

1 Online-Ressource(VII, 161 p. 1 illus.)

Englisch

Erscheint auch als: (Druck-Ausgabe)

Erscheint auch als: (Druck-Ausgabe)

Erscheint auch als: (Druck-Ausgabe)

9789819715985

9789819715978 (ISBN der Printausgabe); 9789819715992 (ISBN der Printausgabe); 9789819716005 (ISBN der Printausgabe)

Elektronische Ressource: Zugang über Resolving-System (Lizenzangabe: Lizenzpflichtig)

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5

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bicssc: JP ; bicssc: 1F ; bisacsh: POL054000

LOC-SH: Asia ; Emigration and immigration. ; Ethnology ; Culture.

1. Moving Story -- 2. Revolution Comes to Zhang Chun Village -- 3. The Postman -- 4. Grandfather’s Two Households -- 5. Things That Bind -- 6. My Sister’s Grave -- 7. Homebound -- 8. Revolutionary Romance -- 9. Soft Trauma.

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The book is a study of an ethnic-Chinese family in Malaysia as it struggled with the upheavals in China during the Land Reform (1945-1953) and the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962). Based on fieldwork in Malaysia and in a village in Dabu County, Southern China, it tells a story of a family whose existence straddled two nations, two political systems. Emigration is shown to be both a positive experience and a source of despair. The study redefines the conventional narrative about the Chinese diaspora as economically driven and politically expedient; mobility, personal freedom and transnational journeying were a part of their cultural history. The book highlights the fact that Chinese homeland, even under communist rule, offered the people a means of identification under difficult circumstances. During the time of radical reform, the diaspora adapted themselves to the conditions in the homeland, and for some China remained a place of longing and emotional attachment. Souchou Yao is a writer and a former staff member of the Department of Anthropology, the University of Sydney, Australia. Among his publications are Singapore: The State and the culture of excess (2007), The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a small distant war (2016), The Shop on High Street: At home with petite capitalism (2020), Doing Lifework in Malaysia (2020). He lives with his wife, the artist Simryn Gill, in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and Sydney, Australia.