20 quotes found
“At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general.”
“My mother could see that as far as my father's relationship with the Party was concerned, she was an outsider. One day, when she ventured some critical comments about the situation and got no respo...”
“Dr. Xia was working as a salaried doctor attached to another man's medicine shop, which did not give him much chance to display his skill. But he worked had, and gradually his reputation began to g...”
“Cixis lack of formal education was more than made up for by her intuitive intelligence, which she liked to use from her earliest years. In 1843, when she was seven, the empire had just finished its...”
“Cixi was not at the coronation. The majestic main part of the Forbidden City was out of bounds to her because she was a woman. She still could not set foot in it, even though she was now the de fa...”
“For Cixi, the whole episode taught her that to survive at court she must hold her tongue about state affairs. This was difficult, as she could see that the dynasty was in trouble. The victorious Ta...”
“As events would show, Cixi was indeed opposed to the foreign policy of her husband and his inner circle but for very different reasons. Silently observing from close quarters, she in fact regarded...”
“The two women did more than resolve a major problem, they went on to form a political alliance and launch a coup. Cixi was twenty-five years old and Empress Zhen a year younger. Facing them were ei...”
“Finally, in 1888, Cixi approved the Western-style Navy Regulations. It was in endorsing these Regulations that she effectively unveiled Chinas first national flag. The country had had no national e...”
“They were endowed with the qualities of youth- they were rebellious, fearless, eager to fight for a 'just cause', thirsty for adventure and action. They were also irresponsible, ignorant, and easy ...”
“She was a pious Buddhist and every day in her prayers asked Buddha not ro reincarnate her as a woman. "Let me become a cat or dog, but not a woman," was her constant murmur as she shuffled around t...”
“Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being "too attached to her family," which was condemned as a "bourgeois habit," and had to see less and less of her o...”
“Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying ...”
“Over the years of the Cultural Revolution, I was to witness people being attacked for saying "thank you" too often, which was branded as "bourgeois hypocrisy"; courtesy was on the brink of extinction.”
“At night I locked my bedroom door, because [my father] could not sleep and would insist on talking to me, endlessly, without making sense. But there was a small window over the door which could not...”
“There were no state regulations about hairstyles or clothes. It was what everyone else was wearing that determined the rules of the day. And because the range was so narrow, people were always look...”
“Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of cri...”
“When I was in China, Mao was Chairman, and parents were terrified to tell their children anything that differed from the party line in case the children repeated it and endangered the whole family.”
“Before our "company" set off, at a wink from the officer, Plumpie stood up and proposed a search. I could see that some of the others thought she was wasting our time, but our company commander che...”
“We visited Mao's old house, which had been turned into a museum-cum-shrine. It was rather grandquite different from my idea of a lodging for exploited peasants, as I had expected it to be. A captio...”
