Coming home to China /
Yi-Fu Tuan.
- xi, 178 pages ; 22 cm
The long flight -- Beijing: first impressions -- A walk in the neighborhood and a gustatory shock -- The summer palace -- A speech to architects: a tour de force? -- A busy day with a satisfactory ending -- Another hotel and a campus tour -- Showing off in Chinese and English -- My student guides -- Lecture and tours in Beijing -- Goodbye Beijing, hello Chongqing -- Touring "authentic" Chongqing -- Revisiting my childhood: Nankai Middle School -- First day on the Yangtze River -- Second day on the Yangtze River -- Stopover in Yichang -- Shanghai: old memories and new experiences -- Last day: food poisoning and conversation -- To the airport and home -- Reflections.
"In the summer of 2005, distinguished geographer Yi-Fu Tuan ventured to China to speak at an international architectural conference, returning for the first time to the place he had left as a child sixty-four years before. He traveled from Beijing to Shanghai, addressing college audiences, floating down the Yangtze River on a riverboat, and visiting his former home in Chongqing. In this enchanting volume, Tuan's childhood memories and musings on the places encountered during this homecoming are interspersed with new lectures, engaging overarching principles of human geography as well as the changing Chinese landscape. Throughout, Tuan's interactions with his hosts, with his colleague's children, and even with a garrulous tour guide, offer insights into one who has spent his life studying place, culture, and self. At the beginning of his trip, Tuan wondered if he would be a stranger among people who looked like him. By its end, he reevaluates his own self-definition as a hyphenated American and sheds new light on human identity's complex roots in history, geography, and language. Yi-Fu Tuan is author of Cosmos and Hearth, Dear Colleague, and Space and Place, all from Minnesota. He retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998."--Publisher description.