A water buffalo wanders onto the landing field of the Taipei airport just as an airplane lands. Two of the survivors of the crash, a Chinese-born professor of Chinese Literature and an American graduate student going to Taiwan to do ethnographic fieldwork, become friends during their stay in the hospital. After their release the friendship continues and in time enlarges to include similarly lonely people, such as the Fongs-a brother and sister who as children saw their parents executed on the streets of Shanghai; Professor Li's nephew and his adopted sister who were destined by Taiwanese tradition to be married; Chen Chieh, a superb cook who holds this unusual family together with her amazing food and has her own secrets; and a few others. Their time together on Taiwan has its share of joys and tragedies that draw the group even closer together in what they call their family. When members of that family marry, they all go to California to celebrate the happy event just in time for a major earthquake that devastates the small city of Santa Rosa and draws the two Fongs, both doctors, into the emergency immediately following the wedding.

Product Description: The Thompsons and the Tanakas worked neighboring apple orchards for three generations before WWII disrupted their community. This story follows the history of the families during and after these troubling times.

The scholarly essays offer study-assessments of the changing roles, status, and lives of Chinese women, urban and rural, wealthy and poor, on the Mainland and Taiwan, in the twentieth century

The Communist revolution promised Chinese women an end to thousands of years of subjugation, an equality with men in all matters legal, political, social, and economic. This book examines the extent to which this promise has been kept. Based on nearly a year of field research and interviews with over 300 women in six widely separated rural and urban areas, it gives us a vivid picture of Chinese women today - their day-to-day lives, their views of the present, and their hopes for the future. To date nothing approximating equality has been achieved: in working conditions, in pay, in educational opportunity. In the cities, and to a lesser extent in the countryside, women are better off than in pre-revolutionary China. But nowhere except in the rhetoric of the regime are they equal to men. Nor does the immediate future look much brighter, given the continuing social constraints, the government's controversial family limitation program, and the nature of the new economic policies introduced in 1980. So far as possible, the women interviewed are allowed to speak for themselves. Some take refuge behind government slogans, some are shy or wary, but a surprising number are quick to give their own opinions despite an ever-present government cadre. These opinions, combined with the author's astute observations on their local and national context, add up to a wholly new perspective on an all too familiar problem.

Product Description: Studies of Chinese society commonly emphasizze men's roles and functions, a not unreasonable approach to a society with patrilineal kinship structure. But this emphasis has left many important gaps in our knowledge of Chinese life...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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