TY  - BOOK
AU  - Yao,Souchou
ED  - SpringerLink (Online service)
TI  - Gifts to the Sad Country: Essays on the Chinese Diaspora 
SN  - 9789819715985
AV  - JQ1-1852 
PY  - 2024///
CY  - Singapore
PB  - Springer Nature Singapore, Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan
KW  - Asia
KW  - Politics and government
KW  - Emigration and immigration
KW  - Ethnology
KW  - Culture
KW  - Asian Politics
KW  - Diaspora Studies
KW  - Asian Culture
N1  - 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
N2  - 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
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5
ER  -