Coming Home to China Yi-Fu Tuan Table of Contents Listen to an Interview with Yi-Fu Tuan		$18.50 paper ISBN: 0-8166-4992-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4992-1 $55.50 cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4991-X ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4991-4
A portrait of returning home after a long absence. In the summer of 2005, distinguished geographer Yi-Fu Tuan ventured to China to speak at an international architectural conference, returning for the first time to the place he had left as a child sixty-four years before. He traveled from Beijing to Shanghai, addressing college audiences, floating down the Yangtze River on a riverboat, and visiting his former home in Chongqing. In this enchanting volume, Tuan’s childhood memories and musings on the places encountered during this homecoming are interspersed with new lectures, engaging overarching principles of human geography as well as the changing Chinese landscape. Throughout, Tuan’s interactions with his hosts, with his colleague’s children, and even with a garrulous tour guide, offer insights into one who has spent his life studying place, culture, and self. At the beginning of his trip, Tuan wondered if he would be a stranger among people who looked like him. By its end, he reevaluates his own self-definition as a hyphenated American and sheds new light on human identity’s complex roots in history, geography, and language. “Coming Home to China both adds to the literature on humanistic geography and reveals more about the life and thoughts of one of its leading architects.” —Annals of the Association of American Geographers “An engaging book.” —Times Literary Supplement “Yi-Fu Tuan is ineluctably present as tour guide and trip philosopher. With him we see, hear, and smell China. His geographies of experience open up new horizons and new questions that leave all of us immeasurably richer.” —Eurasian Geography and Economics Yi-Fu Tuan is author of Cosmos and Hearth, Dear Colleague, and Space and Place. He retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998. 184 pages | 1 halftone | 5 3⁄8 x 8 1⁄2 | 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface The Long Flight Beijing—First Impressions A Walk in the Neighborhood and a Gustatory Shock Summer Palace A Speech to Architects—A Tour de Force?      First Lecture: Topophilia and Topophobia A Busy Day with a Satisfactory Ending Another Hotel and a Campus Tour Showing Off in Chinese and English      Second Lecture: Humanistic Geography My Student Guides Lecture and Tours in Beijing      Third Lecture: A Question in Human Geography Goodbye Beijing, Hello Chongqing Touring "Authentic" Chongqing Revisiting My Childhood-Nankai Middle School First Day on the Yangtze River Second Day on the Yangtze River Stopover in Yi Chang Shanghai—Old Memories and New Experiences Last Day: Food Poisoning and Conversation To the Airport and Home? Reflections