Four Years of Living, Learning, Teaching, and Becoming Half-Chinese in Suzhou, China
| Home Page ABOUT THE BOOK Why a Memoir? Meaning of the Title Book Format What/Where Is Suzhou? Why Suzhou Is So Fitting for This Book Where Can I Buy the Book? SELECTED PREVIEWS Chapter 5: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Chapter 20: A Precious Belt Chapter 29: A City Shuts Down UPDATES SINCE 2006 Our Story Suzhou's Story EXTRA PHOTOS Related to the Book Suzhou 2001-2006 Suzhou Since 2006 ABOUT: The Author My Next Book My SuzhouPlus Website |
  
ABOUT MY NEXT BOOK
I have spent a great deal of time in Suzhou over the last decade -- living there, shopping there, visiting the gardens and temples and museums, watching cultural performances, and bicycling everywhere from the narrow lanes of the old city to what's left of the rural countryside and nearby villages. In the course of all this, I have talked to people, read books, searched the Internet, and generally picked up lots of interesting tidbits about the city and its history. The most important thing I learned, however, was just how much there was to know about Suzhou. A 2,500-year-old city that was once (and for several centuries) the richest and most intellectually and culturally sophisticated, then virtually disappeared for most of the twentieth century only to come roaring back to current economic prominence starting in the 1990's, must have a fascinating story to tell. When I discovered that Suzhou's traditional form of Chinese opera, called Kunqu, was more or less the progenitor of Peking Opera and that the style of brush painting we in the West most closely associate with China more or less originated in the sixteenth century Wu (Suzhou) School of Painting, I decided the city's story needed to be told. In my reasonably well-informed view, Suzhou is one of the three most interesting cities in China (along with the obvious, Beijing and Shanghai), yet most people in the West have never heard of it. I knew that several such "city as story" books had been published in recent years for Shanghai (Stella Dong, Pamela Yatsko) and Beijing (Jasper Becker, Lillian Li, Michael Meyer), but searches through Amazon and the Internet turned up nothing for Suzhou. Well, I shouldn't say "nothing," but what did turn up were mostly academic works, mostly about urban planning or design, along with an occasional book about Chinese gardens or silk embroidery. Nothing that would offer a casual, informative, or entertaining history of Suzhou and its place in Chinese culture and history for the general reader. I spent a significant portion of the summer of 2009 in the Suzhou Library, looking for more books about Suzhou's history and culture. I found a surprising number of books with at least some English text, but most of them were pictorials, translated (often badly) from their original Chinese. All of them had been published in China, and few of them could be found on Amazon (those that were listed could only be purchased used, from third parties). Many contained useful bits of background information, but only one even came close to telling Suzhou's story. So at least for now, that is my next (that is, current) book project. The story of Suzhou: the Chinese paradise on earth, the Venice of the Orient, once quite possibly the richest and most populated city on earth, the cultural soul of China, site of nine UNESCO World Cultural Heritage gardens, home to what Chinese people regard as their country's sweetest-sounding local dialect and its most beautiful women. All that, yet amazingly almost unheard of and unknown outside of mainland China. I am heavily into the research effort now, reading everything I can find about Suzhou and learning fascinating new facts every day. Not just from the several academic works I've been able to acquire (Carroll, Marme, Xu, Clunas, etc.) but also from downloadable online sources like the nineteenth century missionary journals like The Chinese Recorder and The Chinese Repository. My hope is not only to produce a general readership history of Suzhou and its rich cultural heritage but perhaps also to create the foundation for a video version of the city's history built visually around the city's numerous sites. |