Amazing Reads!

I just finished Dreams of Joy, Lisa See's sequel to Shanghai Girls, and I encourage people who are interested in a glimpse of Chinese history wrapped up in beautifully written tragedy, joy, love, desperation, and beauty to read both books.

Shanghai Girls starts out in glamorous 1930s Shanghai. Wealthy twenty-something-year-old sisters, Pearl and May, enjoy the fast-paced hustle and bustle of a city dominated by foreigners... until their father gambles everything away, and the girls are forced into arranged marriages. Then Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, and they flee through the countryside, where horrible things happen. They eventually arrive in San Francisco and must endure months on Ellis Island.

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Dreams of Joy details Pearl and May's daughter's (you'll have to read Shanghai Girls to understand why Joy belongs to both sisters) hasty journey to the People's Republic of China in 1957. Blinded by idealism, Joy throws herself into New China. She lives in a commune in the countryside during the Great Leap Forward... love, camaraderie, starvation, torture, murder... Pearl travels to China to rescue her daughter and spends months in Shanghai waiting and suffering...

That's all I'm giving you. If the story sounds even a little bit interesting, pick them up. I saw used copies of the first book at bn.com for $1.99.

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My New Name: 尚娜 (ShangNa)

I have finally settled on characters for my Chinese name. Most people do this within their first few weeks of arriving in China. But I was lucky, or unlucky... My name is easy for Chinese people to say. Most of them probably assumed my name was my Chinese name. My closest friends here call me NaNa, a nickname based on what they assumed to be my Chinese given name.

So here it is: 尚娜 (ShangNa) For those of you who know about tones, Shang is 1st tone, Na is 4th tone.

I decided to use Shang instead of Shan because I wanted to keep the "aw" sound. Shan is flat. The only cool thing about Shan is I could've used the character for mountain. If you type the pinyin "shang" into Word, you get a choice of 11 characters. The first one I popped into a translator was 尚 because it's easy to write, haha. It means "to value." How rad is that!? So my search stopped there. My Chinese family name is now Shang. The Chinese list their family names before their given names.

Na is a common given name. I'm watching LiNa play in the French Open right now. Although, you probably call her NaLi in your part of the world (I'm assuming most of you live in N.A.). The character 娜 means graceful and elegant. I know those words don't actually describe meeee, but I like the character. The first part (女) is the character for female, and that I am =)

There you have it. I have a new name, although it sounds quite a bit like the one Momma and Pappason gave me.

Love and light,
尚娜