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Rana Mitter is the ideal historian – lucid, engaging, impartial – and he delves into past events that continue to resonate today. Whereas Mitter’s previous book China's War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival (2013) focused on the events of the period, in China's Good War (2020) he takes a different approach, which is to examine how the events of the Second World War continue to shape China’s collective consciousness. As the living memory of the Second World War fades, it is perhaps being superseded by big-budget television shows and films. In China, however, we see the addition of real-world “blockbuster” approaches to perpetuating the memory of the Second World War with the building of museums and events such as the parade in September 2015, in which “[m]issiles, tanks, and marching soldiers all made their way past thousands of spectators from China and abroad.” As a student, I regularly visited the Jewish Museum of Australia in my hometown of Melbourne. There I met Holocaust survivors, whose crude identification tattoos were still clearly visible, who impressed upon me and all of its visitors the powerful phrase: never forget. But what is sometimes less considered is how do we remember. Provided by Lecturer and Coordinator of Spittoon Beijing, Daniel Vuillermin
If you time-traveled to Beijing in 1491 and asked someone on the street whether they liked spicy food, they might imagine dishes prepared with onions or ginger. The chili pepper was still unknown outside the Americas. This led Cultural historian Brian Dott, while sitting in a Sichuanese restaurant in Beijing, to ask himself Why would the Chinese adopt such an extreme, alien flavor? And how did it become so ubiquitous?
It turns out to be a difficult question to answer, as chilis appear in few Chinese or European records. Dott makes a convincing argument that the plant spread stealthily among the lower classes. Multi-ethnic sailors aboard European galleons used it to flavor and preserve their food. From there, it spread inland to poor Chinese farmers in Hunan, Sichuan, and Guizhou, where it became a cheap replacement for preservatives like salt, black pepper, and the mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorn.
Local photographer Liu Yuan Sheng teamed up with British writer – and retired graffiti artist – Tom Dartnell to create a comprehensive study of Beijing’s street art scene. On the surface, Beijing Graffiti appears as though it would be nothing more than a collection of shots around 798, a lazy and superficial attempt at capturing the city’s seemingly “rebellious” underbelly in a country that, to many foreign eyes, is antithetical to self-expression. This book, however, is not that. Featuring interviews with and profiles on 25 artists, Beijing Graffiti is both an ethnographic and ethnologic account of graffiti’s evolution over the past several decades, set against the backdrop of Beijing’s rise to formidable world power.
Braised Pork: A Novel
Images: Amazon, Penguin, University of California Press, Columbia University Press
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