Explore the vast range of titles available.

This book is a cross-cultural critique on the problem of the liberal cosmopolitan in modern Chinese intellectuality in light of Lin Yutang's literary and cultural practices across China and America. It points to the desirability of a middling Chinese modernity.

The cultural hedging and fusion of the new era embodied in literary works is of great significance to the communication, development, and prosperity of Chinese and Western cultures. This paper selects the English works compiled and published by Lin Yutang as the research object and analyzes the communication value generated in the process of its compilation and publication. After designing a questionnaire qualified by reliability and relevance analysis, the questionnaire is used to investigate the audience’s exposure to English works and the degree of understanding of the newage cultural hedging embodied in the works. The results of the survey show that multimedia has become the main channel for audiences to access Lin Yutang’s English works. The audience’s understanding of the new age cultural hedges embodied in the works is poor; the acceptance of the new age cultural hedges is at a medium level (3.514 points), and there is a significant correlation between the acceptance level and the understanding effect. It is also found that the multimedia communication method consisting of video and text in a compiled publication has the best comprehension effect (4.857 points) on the new age cultural hedging of the audience. This paper provides a reference path for the compilation and publication of Lin Yutang’s English works under multimedia and lays a foundation for deepening the audience’s understanding of the new age cultural hedge.

Lin Yutang and Amy Tan share common ground in several aspects. First, they are familiar with both American and Chinese cultures, and second, their cultural orientations are complicated in that while they are visibly attached to the Chinese culture, we may also find some misinterpretations about China in their writings. Additionally, they both write about China for English readers. Meanwhile, when they depict the image of China, their writing and translating involve much of their individualized interpretations of China, which from the intertexual perspective, reflect their respective cultural stances. (The following section is cited with a slight adaptation from the abstract on the same subject that the author presented to the conference “2017 International Conference on Cross-Cultural Studies Intercultural Adaptation, Globalization, and Risk” held in Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei, Taiwan in 2017. It can be accessed at http://english.fju.edu.tw/conference/paper/Wangshaodi%20abstract%209-2.pdf ). The intertextual relations between the writers and the translators’ cultural orientations and their texts can facilitate a foundation to interpret their translation and writing. The writer bases this study on the English writings, biographical backgrounds, and Chinese–English translations of Lin and Tan, attempting to understand the constitution of their attachment to oriental culture and the self-orientalism in their cultural stances. Based on this, the writer studies the image construction of China in their texts and tries to interpret the intertextual relationship between their cultural orientations and their Chinese–English translating and writing, along with an analysis of contributing factors to such manifestations, hoping to shed light on the exploration of the China image construction in the cross-cultural writing and translating between China and America.

A casual inquiry on Facebook led to a stunning discovery. The lone prototype of the legendary MingKwai typewriter has reappeared in a New York basement, after it was assumed lost for more than half a century. Invented by the Chinese writer and scholar Lin Yutang in 1947, the pathbreaking device inspired generations of language-processing technology but was deemed a commercial failure. The story of MingKwai, as well as the life and legacy of its creator, embodies an ancient civilisation's search for modernity and national identity. Its rediscovery raises lingering questions about WHO owns an idea and what it means to be Chinese.

In the introduction to her influential work on Asian American cultural studies and feminist materialist critique, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe shatters the contradictions manifested in Asian immigration, wherein Asians’ entry into the United States marked them either as marginalized from “within” the national political sphere or as linguistically, culturally, and racially “outside” of the national polity For Asian immigrants, the debate of being simultaneously needed and excluded is no more evidenced historically than using Chinese labor during the California Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century. Their migratory relocation was hardly met with ease and public enthusiasm, however. Evoking anxiety in their Anglo counterparts, the Chinese were characterized as foreign noncitizens: barbaric, alien, and dangerous, the quintessential “yellow peril” threatening to displace white European immigrants such as the Irish. The irrational fear of the “Oriental” from the Far East led to a succession of immigration exclusion laws passed by Congress that denied the Chinese from entering the U.S. and their rights to naturalization in 1882. Passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended the entry of Chinese laborers into the U.S. based on their nationality for ten years. This paper argues that the possibility of agency for Chinese workers existed throughout the exclusionary period. Specifically, this site of agency resides with Chinese women and is expressed through a literary mode. For instance, Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948) captures this moment of immigrant agency in the post-exclusion era. Lin, a pioneering Chinese writer and inventor who wrote texts such as My Country and My People (1935), The Importance of Living (1937), and Moment in Peking (1939), often utilized his narratives to bridge the clash between the East and West. Identifying what I see as the inadequacy of probing one of the earliest Chinese American texts from a rigid literary mode, I move to reconsider the novel as a legal counternarrative to the three exclusionary laws: the Page Law of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Cable Act of 1922. To direct my critical reorientation of Lin’s novel away from, though not necessarily against, literary castings of this early immigrant tale, I take the narrative as a strategic literary re-imagination that structures itself around these three legislative pieces to critique restrictive practices enacted upon the Chinese. The novel showcases how Chinese immigrants maneuvered and manipulated the legal system in their favor during assimilation. In this context, critical reappraisal is needed in scrutinizing how the Exclusion Act generated a wave of domestic-based diasporic relocation of Chinese workers from California to New York. Due to acute anti-Chinese sentiments on the West Coast, resetting Chinese workers in the northeast in search of a new Gold Mountain led to a unique phenomenon. This dispersal elevated Chinese women as valuable social capitals who transformed metropoles like New York City and redefined their views as nationalist subjects of the “about-to-be” in industrial capitalist modernity. Through a legal framework, then, Lin’s portrayal of the Fong clan suggests the emergence of a gendered Sino-immigrant agency, one that enabled the Chinese woman/mother to situate herself as the locus of the traditional patriarchal Chinese entrepreneurial family and the forefront of the northeast industrial capitalist scene.

A widespread view denies that there is a concept of the sublime in Chinese thought and philosophical aesthetics. This denial is a mistake. We examine texts and artworks that indicate that the experience of the sublime can be found in Chinese aesthetics and theories of art and aesthetic experience. To show this, we first present an overview of the sublime extracted from western writers: we describe the sublime experience’s structure, objects, and status as a mixed (but ultimately pleasant) experience. These themes are then taken as a guide for the analysis of Chinese terms relating to the sublime (such as chónggāo 崇高). We then examine Chinese sources from both the classical and late modern periods. Moreover, we respond to two objections. We conclude that the sublime is not confined to western or European experiences or to movements within those traditions, such as Romanticism.

The spiritual has always been an important component in literary expression and religious experience, particularly in the context of cross-cultural exchange. Although Lin Yutang’s literary creation has been well received, the relationship between his spiritual thoughts and Christian new evangelization is less commonly mentioned at present, especially from an empirical point of view. This study addresses this gap, contributing to the practice of contextualization in mission work by providing a cross-cultural perspective on Lin Yutang’s creative works related to spiritual pursuit and their possible implications for Christian mission work. Herein, 45 representative literary texts were examined, employing a mixed methods analysis of spiritual motifs, cultural symbols, and audience reception among a range of different populations. Emphasized in the coding were self-transcendence, cultural integration, religious symbolism, and narrative as a strategy for creating spiritual involvement. This article reveals that Lin’s Christian writings reflect a mediating spiritual journey, illustrated by Christian motifs of self-transcendence and holiness. Through the integration of Eastern and Western spiritualities, his works offer helpful resources for the acculturation of the Gospel in mission activities. Readers from different cultural backgrounds have also claimed that their spiritual identification and openness to Christian messages improved after reading Lin’s stories. In this sense, the mediating effect of literature on spirituality contributes to new forms of proclamation that are more in line with the current times. In summary, this research brings Lin Yutang’s works into prominence as an important cultural bridge that enhances Christian new evangelization theories and practices, providing clues for culturally conscious evangelization in a globalized era.