Word: opium
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...there is the delicate tension that comes from knowing that the main event is yet to come, a state of pleasant anxiety in knowing that, whatever harrowing adventures might befall the characters, they are mere preparation for what is to occur later.This novel opens on the cusp of the Opium Wars, with the chaos of the Far East’s opium trade visible just over the precipice. Deeti, an Indian peasant whose husband is an addict, spends her days tending the poppy fields that the sahibs (rulers of the province) forced her and those like her to cultivate. Where...
...Lowdown:As Chang notes, Dongguan is where the First Opium War sent China's Qing Empire on its headlong course towards eventual collapse - and is also where China's first foreign-owned factory opened in 1978. Factory Girls is one of the few books on modern China that deals more with the ramifications of the second milestone than the first, to Chang's great credit. For Dongguan's factory girls, the Cultural Revolution, The Great Leap Forward and the other injustices of the Mao era are stories from aged relatives and history books (As one girl asks another during...
...Beijing and Shanghai today, the famous rhetorical question posed by a British textile tycoon before the Opium War—what if every Chinese added just one inch of fabric to their clothing?—has found new meaning as a generation of Chinese artists now ask What if every European collector bought just one of my paintings? As Zhu Qi, author of the essay Art Capitalism in China writes, showings of Chinese art have become an “assessment index of artist’s position in art scenes and of his market price...
...imperial bravado. But this won't do for Ghosh, a veteran postcolonialist. He instead depicts India as it most likely was under the thumb of Britain's East India Company. Its once bounteous countryside is now run by Company edict, with farmers ordered to grow poppies to feed colossal opium factories, in whose noxious environs even monkeys slump in "a miasma of lethargy." Their fields given over to drug cultivation, thousands of starving, impoverished villagers leave for new pastures as indentured labor in Mauritius, a place so remote that it is thought to be a "demon-plagued land...
...Poppies ends somewhere off the coast of Malaya, with the motley crew we met in India now poised to go off in myriad directions. Ghosh is coy about his next act, but speaks keenly of the month he spent researching in Guangzhou - the Canton of old. Could the Opium Wars soon entangle the Ibis? Or will it be a mutiny of disgruntled migrants? Or what about the machinations of a mysterious ex-pirate from Burma's Muslim Rohingya minority, whose betel-stained gums and drooping mustache make him look "like some bloodthirsty Tartar of the steppes"? Wherever Ghosh's Asian...