Seeking Him Among the Crowd centers on the young woman Wang Fangbei. Her parents are well-known architects in the field, smooth and impeccable in their dealings; Fangbei, by contrast, is carefree and has no interest in fame or profit. Because her writing is sincere and powerful, she receives a commission from a newspaper and begins writing character features. Her parents' client in New York, Mrs. Bai—Deng Rong—is also an avid reader of Fangbei's work and speaks highly of her. Soon, however, a dispute arises between Deng Rong and the Wang couple: Deng Rong discovers that the valuable antique building materials the Wangs sold her are forgeries. This dispute exposes the many falsehoods in the Wang couple's life and also reveals that Fangbei is not their biological daughter. Under one blow after another, Fangbei investigates her own origins while also looking into Deng Rong's background. Deng Rong is a Chinese-American and the third wife of the international media magnate Isaac Perlman; her origins, education, and marriage are all shrouded in mystery. As the investigation deepens, Fangbei discovers that their meeting was no accident: she is in fact Deng Rong's biological daughter, lost in earlier years. The novel uses the phrase "seeking him among the crowd" as a double entendre, writing of the columnist Fangbei searching in a glittering city for the goodness and beauty buried by life, and also of her and Deng Rong each losing and seeking relatives, seeking answers about where to place themselves. Lyrics from old English songs of the last century are interspersed to mirror the characters' states of mind; with her customary plain descriptive style, Yi Shu writes of urban women's identity confusion and emotional struggles in the world of fame and profit.
Founded in 1986, Oriental Press focuses on books in economics and management, inspirational reading, the humanities and social sciences, and lifestyle. Its library of 136 titles spans documentary literature, biography, history, cultural studies, world history and classic works. Representative books include Cao Jinqing's China Along the Yellow River, firsthand accounts of Auschwitz by Maya Lee, Magda Hellinger and others, and Liang Qichao's Scholarly History of China over the Past Three Centuries, Li Jianguo's Chinese Fox Culture and Ma Yong's Zhang Taiyan: A Biography. Its authors include Chinese and international scholars and writers such as Cao Jinqing, Liang Qichao, Li Jianguo, Ma Yong and David Brewster. The list combines academic and cultural works with documentary and biographical titles, and pays attention to collated editions and other forms of textual scholarship. Public information on other publishing activities is limited.
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
