Books published by Camphor Press Ltd

The year 1979 marked turning points in both contemporary Chinese history and Sino-American relations. Deng Xiaoping initiated market reforms and an opening to the global economy which would transform China, with Guangzhou (Canton) at the forefront. Washington and Beijing's mutual diplomatic recognition triggered an across-the-board expansion of relations between the United States and China.When Vice President Walter Mondale traveled to Canton for the formal opening of a new consulate there, career diplomat Richard Williams took office as the first U.S. consul general in mainland China in 30 years, tasked with projecting an American presence, cultivating local contacts, reporting on southern Chinese political and economic developments, promoting U.S. business interests, and issuing visas. Williams's Chinese wife, having left the country 30 years earlier as the Communist government assumed power, was emotionally reunited with brothers and sisters still recovering from Cultural Revolution travails. His son and daughter encountered problems and found adventure as the only foreign teen-agers in Canton.Told with insight, humor, and pathos, At the Dawn of the New China is Ambassador Williams's account of the eventful two years he and his family and colleagues spent in Canton and on extensive travels elsewhere in China. He has expanded his detailed journal with declassified official cables, newspaper accounts, and other materials to provide a vivid and compelling human picture of a China on the brink of great change.

This short volume offers essential information and a basic framework for understanding twentieth-century Korean literature. Growing out of a continuous tradition of over 2,000 years, twentieth-century Korean literature, termed "modern Korean Literature" by Korean scholars, has been shaped by profound social and political transformations on the peninsula. Those decades of great suffering and change gave birth to poets and writers of broad vision and to works of literature that testify both to actual Korean experience within this history and to the Korean spirit of resistance and transcendence. It is this literature that offers the most concrete and abundant knowledge and intuition of the sensibilities and habits of thought and the moral values and aesthetic views that guided the lives of Koreans in the twentieth century.

Deep within the heart of China, far from the glamour of Shanghai and Beijing, lies the Chinese every-city of Huaishi. This worker's paradise of smog and concrete is home to Party Member Yang Wei, a mediocre man in a mediocre job. His content life of bureaucratic monotony is shattered by an encounter with the advanced consumer goods he has long been deprived of. Aided by the cynical and malicious advice of an unlikely mentor, Yang Wei embarks on a journey of greed, corruption, and murder that takes him to the diseased underbelly of Chinese society.Will Yang Wei achieve his ambition of promotion to the mysterious eighth floor? Will he win the love of his beautiful but materialistic colleague, Rainy? And will his penis stop telling him to eat at fast-food restaurants? Just how far will Yang Wei go to achieve his pursuit of wealth, glory, and a better car?Party Members is a bleak and black comedic fantasy about a world where to get rich is glorious, no matter who gets hurt in the process. Designer handbags, sex, karaoke, and shady property deals combine to paint a picture of modern China unlike anything seen before.