Author Description

This volume includes three translated fiction stories. "In Company With a Depression Sufferer," by Chen Jiyi, is a story of two migrants trying to make it in the industrial metropolis of Beijing. As the hero, Chen Chao, cares for the younger Ma Qi, he slowly understands the reasons for Ma Qi's mental anguish in a way that, perhaps, goes far deeper than the problems of the moral decadence of the modern economic center. In Yu Hua's "A Long Journey From Home at Eighteen," the hero, on his way into the world in search of an inn, meets the world's cold reality, but finally finds his inn in a least suspected place. "Buried in Peace," by Yan Xi Zao, tells the inspiring story of a girl's return home to the countryside during Spring Festival with the sad task of taking her final leave of her dying grandmother, but in the process she gains an understanding of herself, her place in the world, and her connection to tradition.We include two auto-biographical essays by Chinese writers: "Self-analysis," by Zhuang Jiamin, is a narrative of a Chinese girl with a fascination for reading romance novels as she deals with discipline from parents she also loves. It is also the generation gap being traversed by today's China, yet grounded in tradition. "My Childhood," by Li Huiyin, tells about a girl raised in the Chinese countryside by her aunt. "The Expressivity of Chinese Instrumental Music," by a professional piano player and music teacher, Kevin Nan Gan, presents the expressive aspect of Chinese music by carefully leading the reader through a model Chinese instrumental piece. Klaus Vieweg's "The Taint of Determinateness - The East and Buddhism from the perspective of Hegel" is an important study on the importance of Hegel's thought for a union of West and East, Buddhism in particular. The core ideas are crucial, I think, for understanding, at a philosophical level, the potential for a union between China and the West thought.