I Return to my Second Home

LAST September, Chai Ran, my classmate and roommate in Shanxi, and I took a train to Yuanping to visit our second home. Twenty-five years ago, we 31 students from Beijing went to live in the Xiadalin Village in Yuanping, Shanxi Province, where we lived and labored for seven years. In our railway car, Chai told me that Yuanping, to which the Xiadalin Village belonged in the past administration, was celebrating its emergence as a city. Chai had married a villager and had returned to Beijing only two years ago. Her son and daughter, who were both born in the village, had just visited there and had brought her the news. Although I knew that Yuanping had changed a great deal, I was still unable to imagine what it had become, since I had left eighteen years ago. In my memory, it was only a series of streets with a     

Inheritance Rights Under Chinese Law

FIFTY-five-year-old Li Xiuhua is a rural woman, whose husband died, leaving her two sons and a daughter, who had all been married. In the past several years, Li Xiuhua and her husband worked very hard and earned a considerable sum of money through pig and rabbit raising. Besides a new house worth 50,000 yuan, they also had a deposit of 100,000 yuan in the bank. After her husband's death, Li Xiuhua's parents-in-law told her that the new house and all the savings would belong to them and their grandchildren if Li     

The Bloody Massacre in My Home

AT 10 a.m.,December 13, 1937, a group of Japanese soldiers banged at the door of the courtyard of our house. They had broken the defense line of the city of Nanjing and had entered the city from the Zhongshan East Gate of the city. Pale with fear, Father looked at our family, my grandparents, my mother, my four sisters, 15, 12, 4 and a baby and me, 9. We shared the courtyard with our neighbor Uncle Ha and his wife     

Deng Xiaoping's Three Marriages (Ⅲ) Deng Xiaoping and Zhuo Lin

IN the summer of 1939, Zhuo Lin met a person named Deng Xiaoping through another. She did not know the ways of the world and was somewhat confused. She only knew that he was a veteran Red Army soldier, a high-ranking military officer who had been on the frontlines of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, but had little idea about what the man was doing and what he     

艺术空间

In August 2006, Peters, who had once worked as an artist and a teacher in the US, traveled to China. Why？ She was searching for a magical coat, which she had seen in a book about textiles when she was a student in Paris. She eventually found the coat in Guizhou, and she quickly realized it was an item of the Miao ethnic groups＇ traditional clothing. Peters met many Miao people in Guizhou, and she was fascinated by the minority group＇s history, culture and beautifully made crafts, such as the batik-dyed clothes.     

Where Is My Home?

WHEN I was asked where my home was the name of the unknown county would always escape my lips. By then I had been in this fancy metropolis for quite a few years. It had accompanied me to do everything and my family, my habits and whatever I had had all been merged with the city. But still I didn't know why I believed that remote and nameless village     

Unending Love

FLIGHT CA 937 from Beijing touched down at London's Heathrow Airport at dusk, and I followed the queue of passengers through the custom gate. A tall blonde woman who appeared to be in her 50s lowered a plaque bearing my name and walked in my direction. She had immediately recognized me from a photograph I had sent to the Londonbased Women's Council the previous month. Hella Huber El-Droubie, a member of the Women's Council, would be my hostess and would become my "special     

Spring Hope—a portrait of Tian Xiaofang, one of the ten best students of the“Spring Bud Project”

TIAN Xiaofang was born in a small mountain village of Banlishu Township, Miao Autonomous County of Mayang, Hunan Province. Owing to their hardscrabble life in the mountains, four generations of her family had never had the chance to go to school. Her father had lost the ability to do heavy physical work after breaking a rib in a farming accident, and from then on, her mother had taken on nearly all the labor for the whole family. To lighten the family's financial burden,     

Pasta, Shanxi Style Hand-pulled Noodles Loved by Tourists and Residents Alike

I had my most delicious meal with noodles in a small village along the Yellow River. It was on a March day a decade ago, when I had just moved to Shanxi Province. I was out in the field as a reporter, and was exhausted and starving after traveling more than 50 kilometers on foot and by bus. A middle-aged man, whom I did not know, was standing in front of his dugout cave, the traditional dwelling of the Shanxi people." He called to me and invited me to have a meal in his home. Upon entering the cave, I was asked to sit on a kang, a brick bed, while the man's wife busied herself with cooking my meal. In no time a huge bowl of youpomian, noodles with Chinese prickly ash oil, was on the table in front of me. My nostrils were immediately filled with the strong and delicious smell of chili and prickly ash.     

Chinese Consumers Wake Up and Take Action

TEN years ago, if you had asked a woman shopping in a market, "What are your rights as a consumer?" chances are, she would have responded with a bewildered face. Today, however, more and more people are trying to protect and enjoy their rights as consumers according to the law. In the past several years, due to outmoded production and a highlycentralized, planned economic system, Chinese residents could only use coupons to buy basic consumer goods. They also faced the problem of whether or not the commodities were available; they had few rights as consumers. The policies of reform and opening up     

The Foolish King (A Folktale of the Uzbek Ethnic Nationality)

ONCE upon a time, there was a poor man who had himself a hut. Because he had little money he had the roof made of a thin layer of poor quality straw matting. One night a thief came. He mounted the roof to see if there was any chance of getting into the house. But the straw mats could not stand his weight and he went right through the roof and fell onto the poor man, who was sound asleep. The thief was annoyed, and went to the King first timing in the morning. "Your Majesty," he said to the King, "I am a thief who knows my job very well. But last night I couldn't steal anything. Instead, I broke my leg." The King sent for the poor man immediately. "It's true, your Majesty," said the poor man when he arrived. "Then you must be sent to the gallows," announced the King, and ordered the gallows to be readied at once. Seeing what a fool the King was, the poor man cried, "I'm innocent, Your Majesty. It is the hut-builder who is guilty, because he didn't build the roof strong enough."     

Traditional Culture Still Influences Chinese Women

TRADITIONAL Chinese culture dates back to ancient times. But this culture is the outcome of a patriarchal agricultural society, and is most certainly stamped with the mark of feudalism. During a time when the state and the family had the same structure, women's problems most typically reflected the characters of the patriarchal clan agricultural society and the traditional culture. Traditional     

赤潮肆虐东海(英文)

Since May, a red tide has been noticed in the East China Sea. The used-to-be blue sea now has a worrying dark red color. It is the result of hundreds and thousands of fish and shrimp corpses floating on the surface. By June, red tides had affected the Bohai, Yellow and     

Making Childbearing Choices

Southwestern Shangdong Province is a hilly and mountaingus area, which is an important place where the state sends aid to the poor. Before 1988, the average annual income was 150 yuan. Production techniques were very backward and people generally bore more children, placing their hopes on the increase of labor. Some had 5 or 6, some had 7 or 8. Consequently, the more they prod.uced, the poorer they became; and the poorer they were, the more they produced.     

My Cares in the World

1 I had lived at Shuiguo Lake in Wuhan for several years, when one day a wasp flew on my balcony. I was sitting there, reading my newspaper. Because I had been stung by wasps many times during my childhood, I had a lingering fear of wasps. I hurried to cover my face with the newspaper, but the wasp flew' unharmed onto my bonsai. I looked at it quietly and it also looked at me. Then it stuck up its tail and lowered its head to drink from the pot. Once it     

Health Consultation in China

ONE Sunday morning, I noticed some people gathered at a clearing outside a school in which my family had an apartment. Feeling curious, I joined them to find that some young dentists, wearing their white coats, were offering free consultations for people. They were selling toothbrushes and dental floss at the same time. One of my teeth was bothering me. It always felt odd when I bit something cold. I consulted with a young dentist, who was wearing a pair of glasses. He asked me many questions like when had it begun to hurt, if I felt the pain, how long it had been since I had it filled the previous time. He asked me to open my mouth and checked the tooth carefully. "You should have your     

Learning to Understand Love

I'M still young, but I've experienced a lot emotionally; I've been married twice and had extramarital affairs. Thinking back on the past, I was really a fool back then, continually mired in confusion. I had my first love affair about 10 years ago when I was a university student, and didn't know much about life.     

me and my Angel

MY dream of being a university student vanished like soap bubbles when I failed the national examination for higher education. Saying goodbye to the high school in town, I returned to the village where I had been born and brought up. The prosaic rural life seemed to be my destiny, but I had no desire to watch my youth slip away in commonplace pursuits. I loved to read books and newspapers, and even kept up my habit of writing my diary. I still had my     

Cross-Country Trek

On August 8, 1998, Wu Qi and Yu Yan arrived at Beijing, the destination of a journey that had taken them more than three years. In travelling across 28 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, by foot, bus and train, these two young women from Guangzhou had covered a distance of 120,000 kJlometers, the first continuous cross-country journey accomplished by women. On the eve of International Women's Day (March 8th) of 1995, Wu Qi and Yu Yan quit their jobs and started out on their cross-country     

Her Career Begins Like This

THE summer of 1990 was almost the end of the world for Huang Kaijun, whose dearly beloved husband was found to have been carrying on with some other woman behind her back and even had a one-year-old son while she was completely in the dark and still dreaming a sweet dream of life. What on earth had happened to their 12 years of marriage? The unexpected heavy