Wang Ping

We have poetry-words with wings," Wang Ping declares in The River Within. Ping's "words with wings" render the vitality of natural forces through corporeal experience. Her love poems extol life forms as varied as elephants, cephalopods, and the virus. Ancient, sentient memory is excavated to tie us to Earth, to be mindful of Earth's pulse and our heartbeats. At the center of this sublime collection is the stunning extended poem "How a Droplet Becomes a Tsunami: Field Notes from Standing Rock" that recalls the years-long oil pipeline protest, the history of Sioux genocide, and a consequential canoe trip that led to the Kinship of Rivers project. With precision and pathos, Wang Ping follows the pipeline account as it flows into the story of rivers, of water, drop by droplet. This is a book to be savored. -Martine Bellen, author of An Anatomy of CuriosityI have a long history of communication with Wang Ping, who has had an instructive and fascinating life between China and the United States. She has been remarkably creative with her time here and her expanding understanding of the American nation and the N. American continent.... her AWP award-winning book Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi, was totally refreshing and important.-Gary SnyderEvery day is different. Every row is different. Every stroke is different. Nothing stays the same. Every day, the Mississippi. Every day, a different river. Wang Ping is a poet by profession and a rower by routine. She sees a deep connection in these things. Flow. Rhythm. Cadence.-John Branch, in "A Long Shining River of Verse, Flowing from a Rower and Writer," NYTSince her first book of poetry, Flesh and Spirit, Wang Ping has been a major moral and spiritual force in American letters.... Her model of consciousness: the cephalopod, which thinks with its limbs. As she writes in the poem,"Magic,""This is the sound of magic / running through our veins / Moving the sky and earth / Passing though us like rivers / All the noise on earth will die / But not this silence of faith / The innocence persisting to believe / To see more than can be seen." ... she is doing the good work of saving us. One strategy: a crown of river sonnets of nearly perfect formality.-Paul Hoover, editor of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology

There are only two ways to live our life, according to Albert Einstein: one is as if nothing is a miracle; the other, as if everything is a miracle. Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi is a book about how the impossible became possible—about things that happened in China and America to the people Wang Ping grew up with, met, and befriended along her journeys between these two distant rivers. This is also a story about water, alive with spirits and energy, giving birth to all sentient beings. We are water. The river runs through us. Those who live in harmony with water can ride the current of the universe—the secret of Tao, reaching all the way to the sea of miracles, one story, one droplet, and one wave at a time. A miracle is a state of mind, a way of living: how we face hardship, pain, and tragedies, how we transform them into fuels for our journey and transcend them into joy and hope. This is a book about how ordinary people perform miracles every day; how we are touched, touching, all the time, across oceans and continents, across time and space, through our stories.

An advanced tertiary-level textbook combining language study with an exploration of Chinese culture and society. The past few decades have seen a rapid growth in Chinese language teaching materials, but very little for advanced learning. This textbook, in Chinese, is designed specifically for advanced Chinese learners in Western universities. Postgraduate students in Chinese studies, anthropology and international relations will also find this textbook useful as it follows an interdisciplinary learning approach and includes a strong research component.

Multirate Switched-Capacitor Circuits for 2-D Signal Processing introduces the concepts of analog multirate signal processing for the efficient implementation of two-dimensional (2-D) filtering in integrated circuit form, particularly from the viewpoints of silicon area and power dissipation. New 2-D switched-capacitor (SC) networks and design techniques are presented, both with finite impulse response (FIR) and infinite impulse response (IIR) with separable denominator polynomial, which offer simpler and more systematic synthesis procedures than currently available design techniques for 2-D analog filters. Since they are in the discrete-time domain, the book can be also referred to the digital multirate signal processing. A 2-D SC image processor that realizes both (2 x 2)nd-order Butterworth lowpass and highpass filtering functions for video image signals was realized as a prototype integrated circuit implemented in 1.0-mum CMOS technology. The experimental characterization of this prototype chip demonstrated the feasibility of real-time analog multirate 2-D image processing with equivalent 8-bits accuracy, using only 2.5 x 3.0 mm2 of silicon area and dissipating as little as 85 mW at 5V supply and 18 MHz sampling rate. This indicates that for moderate accuracy and low to moderate complexity of the filtering function, a fully multirate analog implementation has a potential to achieve a more competitive implementation than an alternative digital VLSI implementation. However, for high accuracy and/or higher processing complexity, not only the relative overhead cost of the front-end and back-end converters will diminish but also the implementation of the processing core in digital VLSI will benefit more of technology scaling to achieve higher density of integration. Multirate Switched-Capacitor Circuits for 2-D Signal Processing is essential reading for practicing analog design engineers and researchers in the field. It is also suitable as a text for an advanced course on the subject.

1996 Book for the Teen Age, The New York Public Library. Seaweed's story, from Maoist China to her New York emigration. "In this first collection of 11 linked stories, the intimate drama of one traditional Chinese family plays against the

“Wang Ping’s The Last Communist Virgin is a beauty of a collection. She has interwoven the earthiness of China and the harshness of immigrant life . . . to create a series of short stories that are at once pitiful, heartbreaking, funny, and deeply inspiring.”—Lisa See, author of Snow Flower and the Secret FanFrom the restaurants of New York’s Chinatown to the retail emporium of Bergdorf Goodman, and from remote Chinese military outposts to the streets of Beijing, the tremors of China’s rapid economic and cultural growth can be felt. As the characters in these stories struggle to find their way, a young girl discovers love amidst a sea of angry Red Guards, émigrés navigate New York’s relentless rat race, an ambitious businesswoman finds the meaning of success in her rival, and an old man returns to a Beijing he doesn’t recognize on a mission to restore his son-in-law’s flagging honor. Moving smoothly across political, cultural, and personal borders and between countries, continents, and languages, these stories open a window into the rapid transformations of an ancient culture and the soul’s thirst for adventure and harmony in a quickly changing world. Wang Ping was born in Shanghai and grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. After three years spent farming in a mountain village commune, she attended Beijing University. In 1985 she left China to study in the United States, earning her PhD from New York University. She is the acclaimed author of the short story collection American Visa, the novel Foreign Devil, two poetry collections: Of Flesh & Spirit and The Magic Whip, and the cultural study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. She now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and teaches at Macalester College. Visit her website at www.wangping.com.

This melodic, visceral collection -juxtaposes the author’s unbridled joy in motherhood with the complex and brutal practice of footbinding in China, the plight of Tibet, and the remarkable endurance of survivors everywhere. The Magic Whip pays particular attention to women and children whose ordeals have been -imprinted on their very bodies and whose memories resonate in these -exceptionally clear poems. Wang Ping, born in Shanghai, came to New York City in 1985 after graduating from Beijing University. She is the acclaimed author of the novel Foreign Devil, the story collection American Visa, the poetry collection Of Flesh & Spirit, and the academic study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota and teaches at Macalester College.

When Wang Ping was nine years old, she secretly set about binding her feet with elastic bands. Footbinding had by then been outlawed in China, women's feet "liberated," but at that young age she desperately wanted the tiny feet her grandmother had-deformed and malodorous as they were. By first examining the root of her own girlhood desire, Wang unleashes a fascinating inquiry into a centuries-old custom. Aching for Beauty combines Wang's unique perspective and remarkable literary gifts in an award-winning exploration of the history and culture surrounding footbinding. In setting out to demystify this reviled tradition, Wang probes an astonishing range of literary references, addresses the relationship between beauty and pain, and discusses the intense female bonds that footbinding fostered. Her comprehensive examination of the notions of hierarchy, femininity, and fetish bound up in the tradition places footbinding in its proper context in Chinese history and opens a window onto an intriguing culture.

A fascinating and haunting exploration of the bound foot in Chinese culture. Why did so many Chinese women over a thousand-year period bind their feet, enduring rotting flesh, throbbing pain, and hampered mobility throughout their lives? What compelled mothers to bind the feet of their young daughters, forcing the girls to walk about on their doubled-over limbs to achieve the breakage of bones requisite for three-inch feet? Why did Chinese men find women’s "golden lotuses"-stench and all-so arousing, inspiring beauty contests for feet, thousands of poems, and erotica in which bound, silk-slippered feet were fetishized and lusted after? As a child growing up during the Cultural Revolution, Wang Ping fantasized about binding her own feet and tried to restrict their growth by wrapping them in elastic bandages. Even though footbinding was not practiced by every woman in late Imperial China, the aesthetic, financial, and erotic advantages of footbinding permeated all aspects of language, ranging from erotic poetry, novels, and performances to food writing, myths, folk songs and ditties, and secret women’s writing, some of it hidden in embroidery. In Aching for Beauty, Wang interprets the mystery of footbinding as part of a womanly heritage-"a roaring ocean current of female language and culture." She also shows that footbinding should not be viewed merely as a function of men’s oppression of women, but rather as a phenomenon of male and female desire deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. Written in an elegant and powerful style, and filled with personal, intriguing, and sometimes paradoxical insights, Aching for Beauty builds bridges from the past to the present, East to West, history to literature, imagination to reality.

Multirate Switched-Capacitor Circuits for 2-D Signal Processing introduces the concepts of analog multirate signal processing for the efficient implementation of two-dimensional (2-D) filtering in integrated circuit form, particularly from the viewpoints of silicon area and power dissipation. New 2-D switched-capacitor (SC) networks and design techniques are presented, both with finite impulse response (FIR) and infinite impulse response (IIR) with separable denominator polynomial, which offer simpler and more systematic synthesis procedures than currently available design techniques for 2-D analog filters. Since they are in the discrete-time domain, the book can be also referred to the digital multirate signal processing. A 2-D SC image processor that realizes both (2 x 2)nd-order Butterworth lowpass and highpass filtering functions for video image signals was realized as a prototype integrated circuit implemented in 1.0-mum CMOS technology. The experimental characterization of this prototype chip demonstrated the feasibility of real-time analog multirate 2-D image processing with equivalent 8-bits accuracy, using only 2.5 x 3.0 mm2 of silicon area and dissipating as little as 85 mW at 5V supply and 18 MHz sampling rate. This indicates that for moderate accuracy and low to moderate complexity of the filtering function, a fully multirate analog implementation has a potential to achieve a more competitive implementation than an alternative digital VLSI implementation. However, for high accuracy and/or higher processing complexity, not only the relative overhead cost of the front-end and back-end converters will diminish but also the implementation of the processing core in digital VLSI will benefit more of technology scaling to achieve higher density of integration. Multirate Switched-Capacitor Circuits for 2-D Signal Processing is essential reading for practicing analog design engineers and researchers in the field. It is also suitable as a text for an advanced course on the subject.