Ruby Sisson Library

Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer prize-winning novel of a China that is now in a contemporary classics edition. Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there," wrote Pearl Buck. In the Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when the...

Lily is haunted by memories--of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness. In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu ("women's writing"). They painted letters...

The exhilarating novel of an elegant woman's subversive new chapter in life. At forty, Madame Wu is beautiful and much respected as the wife of one of China's oldest upper-class houses. Her birthday wish is to find a young concubine for her husband and to move to separate quarters, starting a new chapter of her life. When her wish is granted, she finds herself at leisure, no longer consumed by running a sixty-person household. Now she's free to read...

According to Confucius, "an educated woman is a worthless woman," but Tan Yunxian-born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness-is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations-looking, listening, touching, and asking-something a man can never do with a female patient. From...

In China in the early 1930s, sisters Junan and Yinan are inseparable. Junan enters into an arranged marriage and falls in love with Li Ang, her soldier husband. Separated from him when the Japanese invade China, Junan sends the unmarried Yinan to keep her husband's household. What is intended as an arrangement of convenience turns to betrayal when Li Ang and Yinan have an affair. As China is divided by communism, the family is also rent in two with...

Follows the lives of three young Chinese women who go against tradition and decide not to marry or live as nuns and instead battle for their independence by earning a living on their own.

"In her first collection of stories since the acclaimed Who's Irish?, the beloved author of The Resisters refracts the fifty years since the opening of China through the lives of ordinary people. Beginning with a cheery, kindly letter penned by a Chinese girl in heaven to "poor Mr. Nixon" in hell, Gish Jen embarks on an eleven-story journey through U.S.-Chinese relations, capturing not only the excitement of a world on the brink of tectonic change,...

"Author Amy Tan...takes us deep into the illicit world of 1912 Shanghai, where beautiful courtesans mercilessly compete for the patronage of wealthy gentlemen. For the women, the contest is deadly serious, a perilous game of economic survival that, if played well, can set them up for life as mistresses of the rich and prominent. There is no room for error, however: erotic power is hard to achieve and harder to maintain, especially in the loftiest...