My Mother Would Have Burned This Book – Part 3/5

April 1, 2011

Since writing My Splendid Concubine was not motivated by sexual fantasies, I responded to “outback’s” biased opinion, and he counterattacked saying my book does not “come up to par with Anchee Min, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Charles Dickens, Amy Tan, Pearl S. Buck, James Michener, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Tom Robbins and so on….”

I’d have to agree. I have never even fantasized that I was equal or better than these authors were.

Outback claimed to have read all of the books by the above authors and thousands more yet he only has two, one-star reviews posted on Amazon (at the time I wrote this post).

Where are all those five-star reviews extolling the virtues of the work he admires?

Outback has a right to “his or her” opinion, but I do not have to agree or stay silent as he indicated when “outback” wrote, “P.S. You may want to grow a thicker skin.”

There are other opinions of My Splendid Concubine that do not agree with “colorado outback” that demonstrate a better understanding of why I wrote the novel.

Since “colorado outback” may argue (if he, she or it ever reads this) I quoted a friend’s biased review to defend my “thin skin”, I will use a review from a nonbiased source — the Midwest Book Review, which has posted almost 60,000 reviews on Amazon and compiled about 200,000 helpful votes compared to “outback’s” two reviews with two helpful votes.

The Midwest Book Review has a policy that if a reviewer does not like a book, he or she is to stop reading and find a book they enjoy.  Good thing “colorado outback” doesn’t write reviews here.

The Midwest Book Reviewer wrote of My Splendid Concubine, “Love for ones wives’ sister is typically forbidden by most western religions, but the most successful westerner in Chinese history is faced with this conflict.

“‘My Splendid Concubine’ is the tale of Robert Hart who deals with the matters of his lust and how to deal with them the Chinese way, which so conflict with his upbringing.

“The Taiping Rebellion doesn’t help matters, him making enemies of established and skilled mercenaries in the process of protecting his interest and the women he loves. ‘My Splendid Concubine’ is packed cover to cover with intriguing characters and plot, a must read for historical fiction fans and a fine addition to any collection on the genre.”

To be continued on April 2, 2011 in Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

My Mother Would Have Burned This Book – Part 2/5

March 31, 2011

My reason for writing this series of posts was to show how cultural differences bring about biased opinions due to religious, spiritual and/or cultural beliefs.

In fact, for that reason, I know my mother would have burned my first novel. Books have been written on the subject of sex in America that explains why she would have burned it.

America’s War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust, and Liberty by Marty Klein, Ph D. is one example, which “Spotlights the political, legal and civic battles raging in this country against what is arguably our most private and pluralistic right – sexual freedom.”

In Cultural Differences Defined by Written Language, I attempted to explain why cultures around the globe are not all the same as I have in the past when I wrote of The Collective Culture versus Individualism.

An anonymous reviewer known as “colorado outback” posted a one-star review on Amazon of My Splendid Concubine, “You should Not Buy This Book – Seriously, just Soft Porn.”

My mother would have agreed with “colorado outback”, but that was because she was influenced by her religion.

Outback said, “this seemed more like the sexual fantasy of the author and NOT the historical novel it is purported to be.”

However, “outback” was wrong. The idea to write The Concubine Saga did not bloom from a sexual fantasy or a wet dream, and I’ll explain the real reason later.

To be continued on April 1, 2011 in Part 3 or return to Part 1

View as Single Page

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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My Mother Would Have Burned this Book – Part 1/5

March 30, 2011

The reason my mother would have burned “The Concubine Saga” was because she grew up in a country with the soul of a church. After my mother died, I found a video collection of the Bible, an audio version and about thirty different published versions.

I didn’t know then that there was that many ways to speak for one God.

After my father died, mother spent her last decade to the age of eighty-nine studying the Bible several hours a day. This was her attempt to discover the answer to salvation that haunted her most of her life.

My mother loved to read other books too, as did my father, who was not a religious person. However, if my mother ran into a vivid sex scene in a novel, she threw the book in the fireplace.

Since I was born and raised a Catholic and when I was twelve my mother switched to the Jehovah Witnesses, I know why she would have burned my book.

To Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses, and most devout Christians of all sects, lust is a mortal sin.

In fact, Catholic Questions in a Secular World says, “The seven deadly sins are pride, avarice, envy, wrath, gluttony, sloth and lust.… Lust is the self-indulgent desire for gratification … without the sanctifying graces of marriage.”

When I was single in my thirties, I had a lusty relationship with a lawyer, who ended the relationship due to Christian guilt. She wasn’t a Catholic but she attended two different Christian churches on Sundays, and she made it clear that it was the guilt that drove her to stop seeing me.

By the way, the “Concubine Saga” is historical fiction about a real man that went to China in 1854, bought a concubine and stayed until 1908 to become the most powerful Westerner in China’s history and the only foreigner trusted by the Emperor.

To be continued on March 31, 2011 in Part 2 or View as Single Page

_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Culture Differences Defined by Written Language

March 29, 2011

In a conversation linked to the Yuan-Xiao Festival, a post that appeared on February 17, Alessandro, a European with a degree in East Asian studies living in China with his Chinese wife, wrote a comment that helped me understand something I’d read years ago written by Lin Yutang.

Writing of the “Chinese Mind” on page 81 of the 1938 Holcyon House Edition of My Country and My People, Lin Yutang said, “The Chinese language and grammar … in its form, syntax and vocabulary, reveals an extreme simplicity of thinking, concreteness of imagery and economy of syntactical relationships.”

I didn’t clearly understand what Lin Yutan meant until Alessandro wrote in his recent comment, “The Latin alphabet is a phonetic one, and as such, it simply reproduces the sounds of the spoken language, making it more susceptible of changes whenever the spoken language changes. Chinese Hanzi, on the other hand, conveys almost no “phonetic” information by itself … (and doesn’t change much in its meaning as time passes).”

I talked to my Chinese wife of what Alessandro meant, and she said when she first arrived in the US what she missed most was the lack of books written in mainland Mandarin, which is different than Mandarin in Taiwan.

This explains why she buys so many books in Mandarin each time she/we visit China and brings them home to the US reading sometimes one or two a day until the supply runs dry.


Cultural Competence: Managing Your Prejudices

Alessandro went on to say, “Both Europe and China have had political upheavals and long periods in which they were divided, but (China) having a stable writing system that doesn’t change as much as an alphabetic one helped them not to lose an important element of cultural unity, therefore of “national” identity…

“The Chinese concept of “nation” has nothing to do with the “nation state” concept common in Europe (and North America).

“European nation states are more or less based on ethnicity, while in China it was – and it still somewhat is – based on cultural elements.

“You were Chinese because you shared a common culture, because you acted as a Chinese and assumed Chinese customs.

“Europe never regained the unity (also linguistic) that existed during the Roman Empire, while China always strove to regain unity after each period of division.

“The traditional saying “合久必分，分久必合” — means more or less ‘after unity comes division, after division comes unity‘.”

While the West has many written languages, China has had one for more than two millennia and this has been the glue that helps create a sense of unity and what it means to be Chinese.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

IMAGE with Blurbs and Awards to use on Twitter

Where to Buy

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Boiled in Blood

March 28, 2011

While brutal and corrupt authoritarian dictators in Egypt and Tunisia (supported by Western democracies for decades) were swept away by popular uprisings and a bloody revolution raged in Libya’s Qaddafi land, the Western media made comparisons to China.

The Economist’s Banyan|The wind that will not subside says, “But it is in China that domestic parallels with recent events, above all in Cairo, are on most people’s minds.”

What parallels and which minds?

According to a recent 60 Minutes segment, the uprisings in North Africa were caused by widespread corruption, poverty and unemployment (fallout from the 2008 global financial crises, which caused global losses of about 64 trillion US dollars and millions of lost jobs — 9 million in the US and about 20 million in China — not counting the rest of the world).

When the dictators in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya attempted to stifle unrest with violence, citizens posted pictures on Facebook of the killings and brutality, which led to the revolutions.

There is no guarantee that these revolutions will result in successful Western style democracies.

Another parallel that fails to surface is Facebook. The Wall Street Journal says, “Facebook…doesn’t have operations in Mainland China.”

As for poverty, The World Bank says, “Between 1981 and 2001, the proportion of population living in poverty in China fell from 53 percent to just eight percent,” and Global Issues.org says, “China accounts for nearly all the world’s reduction in poverty.”

Meanwhile, World Hunger.org reports American, “Households with incomes below the poverty line (19.2 percent).”

In addition, to paint China with the same brush as Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, the Economist attempted to rewrite the definition of dictatorship: “China is a dictatorship of a party, not an individual”.


No Wonder the GOP wants to cut funding for  PBS – the truth hurts!

That “party” has more than seventy million members and decisions are based on consensus. The last dictators that ruled mainland China (Mao) and Taiwan (Chiang Kai-shek, who was supported by the US) both died in 1976.

When the United States won the revolution against the British Empire in the 18th century, only 10% of the colonial population was allowed to vote (white men with money and/or property).  

Does that mean the early US was a dictatorship?

The Economist also quoted an editorial on the Caixin Website, saying “Autocracy manufactures turbulence; democracy brews peace.”

Really?

If the Caixin Website were correct that “democracy brews peace”, explain the Guardian’s report of India’s hidden war. “Entire villages have been emptied as tribal communities flee from the burnings, lootings and killings. The civil conflict has left more than 50,000 people camping under tarpaulin sheets without work or food along the roadsides of southern Chhattisgarh.”

India is the world’s largest democracy, but India has fought border wars with China, Nepal and Pakistan.

In addition, while China reduced poverty dramatically, India has done almost nothing for more than six decades.  According to Azad India Foundation, nearly 38% of India’s population (almost 400 million) lives in poverty.

If “democracy brews peace”, it must be boiled in blood, which is evidence that America’s Founding Fathers were right about democracies being ruled by mobs.

Discover Border Crossings and the Blood on Our Hands

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

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