Beautiful Su Is Now Available on Amazon!

Exciting news!

Beautiful Su is now available online at Amazon.com. The official publication date is August 1, 2015. As of this posting, only the print book (soft cover) is available for purchase, with a Kindle version expected in the next week or two.

Click here to be linked directly to the Amazon book page. Thanks to all who are interested -- posted reviews on Amazon are both welcomed and much appreciated.

Two Reasons for the "Beautiful Su" Title

      

Sometimes it seems as though the title choice for a book is as important than what's inside. Consider how iconic some book titles have become: To Kill a Mockingbird, Ulysses, The Jungle, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Silent Spring, and Gone with the Wind, for example. Not that I aspire to such heights (well, not realistically, anyway), but the cultural ubiquity of such renowned titles made me conscious of a title's role as metaphorical shorthand for its book's content and meaning.

As I wrote and revised Beautiful Su, I occasionally thought about prospective titles. Given that Westerners would generally not know what a "Suzhou" was, or even that it was associated with China, an explanatory subtitle would be essential. Nevertheless, a short but meaningful main title was still called for. How was I going to capture 2,500 years of history and culture for a famed city in just a few words and still make it meaningful, or even comprehensible? So many possibilities just seemed so mundane.

I stumbled across the answer one day while writing about Hampden C. DuBose, a Presbyterian minister who spent most of his and his family's life in Suzhou. In 1888, after his first sixteen years there, DuBose penned a series of three linked articles about the city -- all titled "Soochow: The Capital of Kiangsu" -- for the The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal. His series went to some length attempting to introduce Suzhou's long history and esteemed culture to a Western readership, achieving one of the more comprehensive efforts to that date.

Sensing an opportunity as more and more Westerners flocked to turn-of-the-century China, Shanghai publisher Kelly & Walsh engaged DuBose to update and extend his Chinese Recorder articles into an 1899 pamphlet-cum-travel-guide under the title "Beautiful Soo": The Capital of Kiangsu. In 1911, Kelly & Walsh released a second and final (and regrettably posthumous) edition of DuBose's work, revised and updated by the author under the more pragmatic title "Beautiful Soo": A Handbook to Soochow, the Capital of Kiangsu. Prefaced with ads by the likes of Tsingtao Beer, Shanghai's Astor Hotel, and Soochow's Village Inn, generously supplied with photographs of Soochow sites and scenes, and accompanied by a foldout city map, the 80-page booklet closes with a congratulatory message to the city as it embarked on its twenty-fifth century "…with the wisdom of mature years, and the vigor of young manhood…." Little could DuBose have known what that next century would bring.

It seemed clear from the embedded quotation marks that the term "Beautiful Soo" held particular meaning for Reverend DuBose, and it finally dawned on me just what it might have been. The most famous adage attached to Suzhou states, in pinyin form, "Xiang you tian tang, xia you Su Hang," variously translated as "Above there is heaven, here below are Suzhou and Hangzhou." In Chinese poetic fashion, the characters for "Su Hang" were more than enough to signify the names of the two cities revered as heaven on earth, although DuBose would have spelled them "Soo Hang." His "Beautiful Soo" was not only a personal statement of his love for his adopted city, but also an allusion to the centuries-old adage by which Suzhou was best known.

At that point, the choice of title was easy. Beautiful Su was both my tip of the hat - a quiet homage - to Reverend DuBose and his pamphlet history of a century past and an acknowledgment of the Chinese people's longstanding assessment of Su (and Hang) as special places in their past, and still a "Beautiful Su" in their present.

Beautiful Su at Book Expo America (BEA)

Even though it was only presented in proof form, Beautiful Su received its first public introduction in the main booth of the China International Publishing Group (CIPG) at the just-finished Book Exposition America (BEA) at the Javits Center, May 28 - May 30. My publisher, China Books, is a subsidiary of CIPG and one of two American-based divisions (with Long River Press) that focus on books about Chinese history and culture intended for an American/Western readership.

This year's BEA featured the People's Republic of China as the guest of honor at the show's Global Market Forum, so there was special interest among visitors in books about China, particularly if they are written in English. A number of visitors stopped by to browse the China Books and Long River displays, and a number of them expressed interest in knowing when Beautiful Su would be available for purchase.

More work to do in the next few weeks: review the proof, decide on photo placements, make last-minute corrections and updates, add a reference to this blog site, and complete the topics list for the indexer. Hopefully, the published version will be available (and on Amazon, etc.) in another month or so.

The lead picture above is me with a copy of Beautiful Su and Executive Editor Chris Robyn with a copy of my first "China book," a memoir of my Suzhou experiences from 2001 - 2006 titled China, Heart and Soul. A few more captioned BEA photos follow below.

On the rack!

It's good to share with others!

With Mr. Wang Xin, President, Sinomedia International Group

Lots of activity at our CIPG booth

Lovely central display for Chinese publishing contingent

Why I Wrote Beautiful Su

I would never have written this book if someone had already done it, but such was not the case. I spent a great deal of time in Suzhou between 2001 and 2006, and every day brought more and more familiarity with the city, from its waterways and narrow, labyrinthine lanes and its famed classical gardens and historical landmarks.

During my earliest years in Suzhou, I served as a visiting English language teacher at No. 2 Senior Middle School (i.e., High School) and then at No. 26 Middle School. Both positions were arranged by Mr. Xu Lei, an Assistant Principal at No. 2 and Principal at No. 26. It was Xu Lei who insisted that for as many of my weekly appearances as possible, members of his English language teaching staff should accompany me on outings to local sites of interest. Thus it was that I became increasingly familiar with Suzhou's history, primarily through excursions to its World Heritage Gardens but as well through visits to other schools and even a boat tour around the canal that once stood as the city's defensive moat.

The more cultural and historical tidbits I acquired, the more I felt emboldened to explore on my own or seek out other sites with Ping Ping's (my Suzhounese wife's) assistance. I also became increasingly interested to learn about the city's history, but repeated trips to the local (Xinhua) book store and even the Foreign Languages Bookstore yielded little more than tourist-oriented picture books and an occasional, very spotty work purporting to tell that story, usually in badly mangled English. Searches on Amazon, Google, and the like turned up several books, each focusing on specific aspects of Suzhou's history: economic development during the Ming Dynasty, urban transformation in the late Qing and early Republican era, urban form over time, the role of connoisseurship among the literati scholar class of the Ming Dynasty. All were rather academic, and none provided the sort of end-to-end historical tale I had hoped to find.

By 2006 or 2007, I had pretty much made up my mind. I knew enough to know that Suzhou was a special city, renowned in China but virtually unknown to Westerners. A fascinating story was just waiting to be told, and Westerners needed to know that when they traveled to China, there was a marvelous cultural experience available to them just fifty miles--a thirty-minute high-speed train ride--from Shanghai. Thus began an eight-year period of intensive research and learning, more site visits, and lots of writing and rewriting. The more I learned, the more convinced I was that Suzhou's was a story worth telling, and a story worth hearing. The result is this book, Beautiful Su.

At this writing, Beautiful Su is still in preparation for final publication. Here's a look at the preliminary draft of the front and back cover.

My plan for this blog is to supplement the book's content - perhaps with content not included in the book, or new, updated, or corrected information as I learn it, or photos or links to other useful websites.  My goal remains unchanged: to tell a remarkable, cultural-rich story of a famous Chinese city in a way that engages a Western reading audience as thoroughly as the city itself has engaged me.