Great Walls of Discourse, And Other Adventures in Cultural China (Reviews of Books) (Book Review‪)‬

Great Walls of Discourse, and Other Adventures in Cultural China. By HAUN SAUSSY. Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 212. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2002. Pp. 289, illus. $45 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). I recall having been told as a child that the Chinese did everything backward. This news amounted to an irresistible inspiration to adopt what we would now call an innovative lifestyle. I announced that I was going to live like the Chinese henceforth and that my first experiment along these lines would be to sleep with my head under the bedclothes and my feet on the pillow, which was about the most egregious form of doing things backward that my infant imagination could supply. The resulting headache drove my sinophilia underground, not to emerge again until university, but the episode, though unpublished, may nonetheless fall within the scope of the issues that Haun Saussy explores in this thoughtful and wide-ranging book.