Böcker av Charles N. Li

For fans of SHOGUN and from the publisher of the multi-million copy bestseller WICKED comes another iconic story inspired by an even more world-famous hero, LORD GUAN, the honorable warrior who tried to restore the Han dynasty in second-century China. His military maneuvers, warrior brotherhood, and romance with an escaped concubine are legendary and have been the subject of TV, Film and Video Games worldwide. Dozens of temples have been built to pay homage to him worldwide. This fully imagined and dramatic account of the life of Lord Guan, researched meticulously by a scholar of Chinese history and linguistics, is being developed as a rap musical and will inspire readers of all generations for years to come.Over one-and-half millennia, Guan Yu (160 - 220 A.D.), also known as Guan Gong (Lord Guan), was a pan-Asiatic hero canonized and deified repeatedly throughout Asia. This novel depicts his humble rural origin, his serendipitous apprenticeship in martial arts, his rise as an invincible warrior, and his dedication and journey to restore the great Han Dynasty (206 B.C. - 220 A.D.) during a tumultuous, war-torn era of Chinese history. At the onset of his mission, he forms a brotherhood with two equally idealistic devotees of the Han Dynasty. The three men, known as the Peach Garden Brothers, become the core of a military contingent vying with warlords to control the declining Han Empire. During the years of war, Lord Guan meets the gifted and educated beauty Xian-Hui, who was kidnaped by the Imperial Palace eunuchs and forced to serve as a concubine. She miraculously escapes the bondage of being an imperial concubine and serendipitously meets Lord Guan during her chilling escape. Lord Guan gave his life for his mission. In the end he did not succeed in restoring the Han Dynasty, but his exploits have become the essence of Chinese folklore, and he has lived on in the minds and hearts of millions throughout history as the paragon of courage, integrity and loyalty. His exploits have been romanticized in the classic epic of Chinese literature, the 14th century novel, "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms". His character has been memorialized throughout the centuries in thousands of shrines throughout Asia and in all media including opera, film, art, literature, and video games. This novel highlights his journey and is the story of the making of a hero for all times.

Born near the beginning of World War II, Li Na was the youngest son of a wealthy Chinese government official. He saw his father jailed for treason and his family's fortunes dashed when Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists came to power in 1945. He watched from his aunt's Shanghai apartment as the Communist army seized the city in 1948. He experienced the heady materialism of the decadent foreign "white ghosts" in British Hong Kong and starved within the harsh confines of a Communist reform school. Over the course of twenty-one tumultuous years, he went from Li Na, the dutiful Chinese son yearning for a stern, manipulative father's love, to Charles, an independent Chinese American seeking no one's approval but his own. Lyrical and luminous, intense and extraordinary, The Bitter Sea is an unforgettable true story of a young man, his father, and his country.

Offers a description of the grammar of Mandarin Chinese, the official spoken language of China and Taiwan, in functional terms. This title focuses on the role and meanings of word-level and sentence-level structures in actual conversations.