The Tao of Life Stories: Chinese Language, Poetry, and Culture in Education
«A poet, a theorist, a life historian, Xin Li has produced an important work of beauty and power. With its ‘splicings’ and ‘knots,’ this remarkable book creates a hybrid discourse that enriches and complicates our understandings of curriculum as autobiographical and international text.» (William F. Pinar, St. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed Professor, AERA 2000 Life Achievement Award Winner, Louisiana State University)«‘The Tao of Life Stories’ provides a remarkably intimate portrait of a number of Chinese women who have struggled through the webs and snares of immigration to find new lives for themselves in America. We are led through the modern history of China, and especially the Cultural Revolution under Mao, to see how the dream of going ‘abroad’ is constructed as an emancipatory space for the resolution of personal oppression on the home front. Living abroad brings its own tensions as old currencies of identity have no value in the new reality. This book is a powerful testimony to the courage of a group of women determined not to be subdued by difficulty. Its central themes are universal and enduring: the value of friendship, the problem of understanding across cultures, the quest for home after leaving home, and intergenerational conflict. Of special importance is the way the author articulates the ancient wisdom of Tao as an interpretive frame for understanding a ‘way’ of living in the midst of perplexity and contradiction. The book is also woven through the experience of teaching English as a second language and so will be of special interest to teachers who work with immigrant students. I highly recommend this book for its human interest and its pedagogical address.» (David Geoffrey Smith, International Forum on Education and Society, Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta)«‘The Tao of Life Stories’ is part of a new wave of literature on identity in a world of shortened distances and frequent cultural border crossings. This is an enlightening story of the Chinese Cultural Revolution seen from both sides, the workers’ and bourgeois’. The ‘knotting’ that takes place between Xin Li and her participant protagonists during the Revolution and years later, on neutral ground in North America, says much about culture, identity, and the human spirit.» (Michael F. Connelly, AERA 1999 Life Achievement Award Winner, University of Toronto)«Xin Li’s meditations take the reader into the heart of what it means to live with interruption. While, on the surface, she tells the suffering stories ‘about’ Chinese women immigrants - their hardships endured in two lands of differing intolerances - the narratives take us deeper. These compelling private histories throw into question any clear understanding of public history known with tidy terms like ‘cultural revolution’ or ‘land of the free.’ With her unique Taoist insights and poetic splicings, Xin Li explores the very nature of opposition as an unfolding pattern of life itself. This signifi-cant work gives texture to current discourses in the postmodern class-room - such as difference, poststructuralism, and chaos theory - and allows us to feel our own strangeness less strangely.» (Mary Aswell Doll, Author of ‘Like Letters in Running Water: A Mythopoetics of Curriculum and To the Lighthouse and Back: Writings on Teaching and Living,’ Peter Lang, 1995)