Looking for Chengdu: A Woman's Adventures in China (Anthropology of Contemporary Issues, (Pap))

Rating:
Summary: Book description:
Review: For decades, anthropologist Hill Gates had waited for an opportunity to get to know the citizens of China as she had done in Taiwan--face to face, over an extended period of time. At last in the late 1980s she set out on an excursion to Sichuan Province. That visit was the first of many she would make there on a remarkable double adventure: to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese women and to complete a difficult passage in her own life. Looking for Chengdu is her memoir of these trips. By turns analytic, witty, and bittersweet, Gates's observations on contemporary China are enlivened by a keen eye for the oddities of human behavior, including her own.

The vast, inland province of Sichuan was the birthplace of the Chinese economic reforms of the 1970s, and is now speeding from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Was its economic boom transforming women's lives, Gates wondered? After a generation of socialist rule, would women risk the challenge of entrepreneurship? A feminist, she was especially curious to learn what Chinese of both sexes defined as women's rights.

Gates traveled--by boat, train, bus, car, bicycle, and foot (her preference)--across the spectacular countryside, gleaning insight into China's massive bureaucracies from her experiences on an obligatory vacation, in a Tibetan dance-hall, and at a shouting match in her Chengdu home. She met dozens of hard-working, stylish women running family firms, and crossed paths with scholars and sailors. Her book is rich in anecdotes and compelling moments, from her journey through mountain villages in search of five thousand women with bound feet to low-voiced conversations about the Chengdu equivalent of the events at Tiananmen Square.

A fascinating glimpse into the deeply personal vocation of anthropology, Gates's memoir will change the way readers think about the Chinese people.

Rating:
Summary: Book description:
Review: For decades, anthropologist Hill Gates had waited for an opportunity to get to know the citizens of China as she had done in Taiwan-face to face, over an extended period of time. At last in the late 1980s she set out on an excursion to Sichuan Province. That visit was the first of many she would make there on a remarkable double adventure: to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese women and to complete a difficult passage in her own life. Looking for Chengdu is her memoir of these trips. By turns analytic, witty, and bittersweet, Gates's observations on contemporary China are enlivened by a keen eye for the oddities of human behavior, including her own.

The vast, inland province of Sichuan was the birthplace of the Chinese economic reforms of the 1970s, and is now speeding from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Was its economic boom transforming women's lives, Gates wondered? After a generation of socialist rule, would women risk the challenge of entrepreneurship? A feminist, she was especially curious to learn what Chinese of both sexes defined as women's rights.

Gates traveled-by boat, train, bus, car, bicycle, and foot (her preference)-across the spectacular countryside, gleaning insight into China's massive bureaucracies from her experiences on an obligatory vacation, in a Tibetan dance-hall, and at a shouting match in her Chengdu home. She met dozens of hard-working, stylish women running family firms, and crossed paths with scholars and sailors. Her book is rich in anecdotes and compelling moments, from her journey through mountain villages in search of five thousand women with bound feet to low-voiced conversations about the Chengdu equivalent of the events at Tiananmen Square.

A fascinating glimpse into the deeply personal vocation of anthropology, Gates's memoir will change the way readers think about the Chinese people.

Rating:
Summary: What We're Looking For When We're Looking for Chengdu
Review: I lived in Japan for 9 years and this is a book I want to give friends who ask what it was like. Even though this book is about China, and China and Japan are not the same thing, reading this book helped me to understand much about what I had seen and been through in my own experience. Yes! Yes! Yes! I kept saying when I read it. This is how it was. And here is somebody putting it into words.

There are the underlying truths about Asia, and greater yet underlying truths about crossing between any two cultures. Finally, there are the truths about any woman's life whether she stays home or travels far. Hill Gates calls them as we all have seen them, from getting your period to getting your hair cut in a foreign land. There are the long van rides that constitute "vacations," the forced alcohol, the question of breakfast foods, unheated living quarters, unexplained prohibitions, glorious discoveries of beautiful scenery, and the eternal question of whether being a foreigner means you're also actually a woman.

But most of all, it's about the work. In this case, the work is anthropology. Here again, universal truths apply. Good work gives you an adequate struggle. You want to solve things, you want to apply your own talents. You want to learn and contribute, get and give, laugh and cry. Really, you do. You hope to be changed by it and come back with something to report. You enjoy sinking into the luxuries and comforts of your own familiar culture once you make it back to dry land. And then, one day down the road, you get that hankering to leave those comforts again...What a privilege having this life is. All it costs is the belief that you have control over anything.

My favorite quote from the book ought to warn off anyone who thinks you get to control your own dignity once you choose to put yourself out there. Gates nails it as she observes that, "When it comes to etiquette, the home team has the advantage."

Rating:
Summary: What We're Looking For When We're Looking for Chengdu
Review: I lived in Japan for 9 years and this is a book I want to give friends who ask what it was like. Even though this book is about China, and China and Japan are not the same thing, reading this book helped me to understand much about what I had seen and been through in my own experience. Yes! Yes! Yes! I kept saying when I read it. This is how it was. And here is somebody putting it into words.

There are the underlying truths about Asia, and greater yet underlying truths about crossing between any two cultures. Finally, there are the truths about any woman's life whether she stays home or travels far. Hill Gates calls them as we all have seen them, from getting your period to getting your hair cut in a foreign land. There are the long van rides that constitute "vacations," the forced alcohol, the question of breakfast foods, unheated living quarters, unexplained prohibitions, glorious discoveries of beautiful scenery, and the eternal question of whether being a foreigner means you're also actually a woman.

But most of all, it's about the work. In this case, the work is anthropology. Here again, universal truths apply. Good work gives you an adequate struggle. You want to solve things, you want to apply your own talents. You want to learn and contribute, get and give, laugh and cry. Really, you do. You hope to be changed by it and come back with something to report. You enjoy sinking into the luxuries and comforts of your own familiar culture once you make it back to dry land. And then, one day down the road, you get that hankering to leave those comforts again...What a privilege having this life is. All it costs is the belief that you have control over anything.

My favorite quote from the book ought to warn off anyone who thinks you get to control your own dignity once you choose to put yourself out there. Gates nails it as she observes that, "When it comes to etiquette, the home team has the advantage."

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Summary: Observing the transition from Maoism on the ground
Review: Perhaps a third of the book is about traveling in China, mostly in southwestern China, where private enterprise blossomed during the 1980s. The other two thirds are about trying to do research funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, sponsored and administered by the Sichuan Fulian (Women's Federation--literally "Women United"). Anthropologists' fieldwork memoirs are published after more academic presentation of their research results--in Gates's case, a 1997 book _China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism_ (that compares what she observed in the 1970s in Taiwan, historical records, and her 1987-96 research in Sichuan). The discomforts, including sickness, depression, frustrations about transportation, food, lodging, access to information, and the misunderstanding by "the natives" of the anthropologist's wisdom and good-will may not be vented in public at all.

Although the author is the major character in the account of her research in the years before and after the crackdown of the PRC gernotacry on private consumption and the accumulation of riches by anyone other than the families of high-placed officials, unlike much contemporary postmodernist anthropology, Gates remains interested in the agency of people (particularly women) trying to prosper in changing and difficult conditions in societies organized differently than the anthropologists' own one. Gates is engagingly honest about her frustrations with Chinese life as well as her joys of solidarity with those she studied and the reader learns some things about living through rapid change in the Chinese interior from her insightful book.

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Summary: A view of Chinese women¿s entrepreneurial spirit
Review: This book is a memoir of a decade past written following a Rockerfeller grant to study the women's emancipation movement in SW PRChina, to later compare and contrast with a similar study in Taipei, Taiwan. This fieldwork is undertaken with the cooperation of the Propaganda Dept, Women's Federation, Chengdu, Szechwan province, PRChina.

Structurally this book is a daily diary which covers, in part, her travels in China as well as some highlights of 100 interviews on women-owned, small business entrepreneurs, that were formed during the Deng's Reform and Opening campaign of the late 80s.

Her POE is Guangzhou, where she decides to initially travel alone much as the natives do. Her travel scenarios, including her visit to Kunming, City of Eternal Spring, in the first 50 pages of the book, where she had local academic acquaintances to show her the sights. She speaks Putonghua, a form of Mandarin, so she can slowly communicate with the locals in a basic form. It appears that she does not like reading Chinese. In part, she writes with the older Wade-Giles form of romanization, so Szechwan is Sichuan and Taipei is Taibei. Armed with an Academy letter, she uses it to travel, as best she can to cajole the ticket sellers and hostel and guesthouse desks, the way the natives do, and cites prices in RMB, and FEC only when there is no other alternative or she wishes to splurge with a hot bath.

The more memorable scenarios is her visit to Kunming, capital of the mountainous Yunnan province p36-44 in December 1988. They travel up the Burma Road a bit and discuss the minority people and their distinctive dress p54-8. She eats the native food and promptly gets a bad case of diarrhea, spends two days in bed. She buys a beautiful Naxi cape from a leather maker that was destined to be another bride's dowry.

Halfway through her anthropological project, her tired workgroup of four demands that she take vacation and unknownst to her, her host department arranged a 7-day holiday with a drive and excursion into far Western Szechwan province to enjoy the Fall colors and stay with a Tibetan family p109-138. Anticipating a boring trip and getting behind in her project, she crankily accompanies the group during another PMS episode. Contrary to her expectation, she enjoys the trip immensely, romps in the forest, and sees blue sky. At each stop, there are local Women's Federation reps to show the group around and introduce them to native families, translate discussions, and describe what they are seeing. They discuss the Tibetan-Han dichotomy and how each culture tries to co-exist.

There are about 20 scenarios on interviews on women-owned businesses in the book. Most businesses are small, from mom & pop format to ones with handfuls of employees. They are the stereotypical grocery, restaurant, garment, and etc format. What I got out of the book was that women's survival during the "Great Leap Forward" and Cultural Revolution was very harsh, especially in the countryside. Initially the Politburo encouraged formation of these businesses, the owners used the profits to improve their houses, and then the tax collectors came to even things out in the socialist's tradition. So the Politburo is inventing their policies at time goes. It seeds flourishing entrepreneur until they become successful, then taxes them for an increased revenue stream.

Her writing is fairly well crafted and she discusses scenarios of general interest, so that one can finish the book without getting truly bored of repetitious fieldwork details. The book, divided into 19 chapters, includes about 20 photos of subjects, maps and travel itineries to follow along. There is no index and any notes are referenced on the bottom of the page. Comparatively, I would consider her prose better and more comprehensive than Paul Theroux, a China travel writer covering the same time period. But Peter Hessler is a better describer of Chinese thought and behavior; of course he spent 2 years at a teachers college and learned the local dialect. But as indicated in the preface, she notes her literary limits and includes her published bibliography of academic work.

The author is a Canadian born, UK raised and educated, who writes in UK prose, so you have to decipher the usual suspects that differ in UK vs US English. She earns her doctorate at Central Michigan U, but is at heart a Brit feminist, and constantly refers to it during her sojourn. From time to time this divorced, pre-menopausal woman titillates the reader with her fantasies as a ravishing redhead in China. To me this was pulp-fiction that the editors must have required her to put in the scripts to help sales. I could have also done without the monthly PMS issues.

She keeps contemporaneous notes on her notebook computer, so hopefully 10 years later, she doesn't over embellish or forget the details of her 6 month sojourn in Chengdu. I read this book at a local library.

She attempts to unify her prose by introducing a historical mentor that went before her, a fellow Brit, Ms Isabella Bird Bishop, who does China research in Szechwan a century earlier. Since she merely references her work in a couple pages p48-9, I find it rather distracting, yet amused that she compared her journey to hers.

Rating:
Summary: on the absurdity of Amazon reviews
Review: Yes, I have read some of Gates' work, but not this one - it doesn't matter in this system. I am merely balancing a double counting of a positive textual review that registers numerically as a zero, thus artificially generating a very low average.
On balance Amazon reviews are useful, but the lack of control leads to this sort of nonsense. Note also the lack of signature on the doubled review; presumably just an error but one wonders given the recent Canadian site boondoggle with these reviews.

Rating:
Summary: on the absurdity of Amazon reviews
Review: Yes, I have read some of Gates' work, but not this one - it doesn't matter in this system. I am merely balancing a double counting of a positive textual review that registers numerically as a zero, thus artificially generating a very low average.
On balance Amazon reviews are useful, but the lack of control leads to this sort of nonsense. Note also the lack of signature on the doubled review; presumably just an error but one wonders given the recent Canadian site boondoggle with these reviews.