Lost Horizon Research Articles

East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America by Karen Kuo (review)

Reviewed by: East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America by Karen Kuo Elise Lemire (bio) East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America, by Karen Kuo. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Xi + 237 pp. $26.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4399-0587-6. Within American studies and its various branches, much of the scholarship about sexual and other kinds of interracial encounters focuses on white American anxiety. Karen Kuo broadens our purview considerably. Her wonderfully astute [End Page 120] study finds that even during the period when the United States prohibited Asian immigration, there were literary and filmic texts by and in which white and Asian Americans anticipated greater freedoms through intimate relationships across historical racial boundaries. Deeply invested in examining what she describes as a “mutual gaze” (9), Kuo devotes the first half of East Is West and West Is East to texts that imagine Asians and Asian Americans in the United States and the second to texts that imagine white Americans in Asia. Each of her four largely independent chapters is centered on one text: the Universal picture East Is West (1930), Younghill Kang’s fictionalized memoir East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937), the Frank Capra film Lost Horizon (1937), and Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (1935), by Japanese activist Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto. One of the most compelling chapters in the book, on Capra’s Hollywood film, explores how white men sought freedom from militarized masculinity and other modern constraints in the idea of “Asia.” In Lost Horizon, a group of white men find a kind of gender utopia when their plane crashes in an unspecified region of Asia. Once settled at Shangri-la, the survivors, led by a diplomat and former soldier described as Britain’s “Man of the East,” learn to appreciate a new kind of community in which people barter for goods and services and work together on various initiatives. Safe from capitalism and the modern nation state, the white men are able to adopt a new kind of masculinity associated, as Kuo shows us, with “pacifism, nonaggression, cooperation, and even, at times, nurturing” (99). Ultimately, however, the film’s vision is limited by the fact that the Asians living in Shangri-la exist solely to serve the white population. There’s also the problem of a weak ending in which it is unclear if the Man of the East stays in Shangri-la in order to remake the world or retreat from it. Indeed, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Capra had little trouble doctoring the film so that it could be re-released as an anti-Asian propaganda film. The “alternative masculinity” that the Man of the East finds at Shangri-la “cannot be fully imagined as anchoring a new global world” (130–31). In another richly detailed chapter, Kuo convinces us that a text long regarded as intensely anxious about interracial sex and Chinese immigration is in fact using these issues to manifest more general concerns about white women’s sexuality. In the film East Is West, a white California family is distressed when son Billy falls in love with the recently arrived and provocatively named Ming Toy. Their concern evaporates instantly when it is revealed that Billy’s rather racy beloved is in fact the daughter of white missionary parents whose deaths resulted in her adoption by a Chinese family. It seems the film is less concerned about Chinese women’s sexuality harming white American men than about the possibility that there is [End Page 121] little distinguishing Chinese women’s sexual behavior from white women’s. Here, again, American culture used the idea of “Asia” as a mirror in which to see and explore something about itself. Again and again, Kuo is able to tease out often surprising tensions in the various texts she examines, using their production and publication histories as well as contemporary reviews to provide the thickest possible context for her readings. Kuo explores, for example, the friendship between Ishimoto and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger in order to show how Ishimoto’s...

The Secret of Shangri-La: Agricultural Travels and the Rise of Organic Farming Discourse

The Secret of Shangri-La: Agricultural Travels and the Rise of Organic Farming Discourse

Commentary on “Elements of Psychotherapy in Navaho Religion”: Lost Horizons

Commentary on “Elements of Psychotherapy in Navaho Religion”: Lost HorizonsDavid V. ForrestDavid V. ForrestClinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. E-mail: [email protected].Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:December 2011https://doi.org/10.1521/psyc.2011.74.4.310PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Cited byCited byDavid V. Forrest1. Angst: Origins of Anxiety and Depression, by Jeffrey P. Kahn, M.D.Online publication date: 21 August 2013. Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar Volume 74Issue 4Dec 2011 Information© 2011 Guilford Publications Inc.PDF download

Shangri-La

Lost Horizon (Hilton) is a captivating novel about a remote idyllic place called Shangri-La, located somewhere in the mountains of Tibet. This fabled place is a wonderland where man and nature coexist in harmony as do several ethnic groups. It is a land of eternally young inhabitants blessed with magnificent landscapes shrouded in mysticism. The fantasy of this mythical place has fueled a search that has yielded many Shangri-Las in the Himalayas, each attempting to fulfill Hilton’s vision. Nevertheless, only one of them, the county of Zhongdian in China’s Yunnan Province, has been granted the use of Shangri-La brand name by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) State Council. In the present study, the researchers find that the reshaping of Zhongdian into the enchanted land of Shangri-La relies upon processes of sacralization, ethnitization, and exoticization. This research explores the construction and marketization of this mythical creation and its cultural, economic, social, and environmental consequences. This analysis also distinguishes the contrasting aims of Han Chinese and Western tourists when traveling to this encapsulated paradise.

A Lost Horizon: Perils and Possibilities of the Obvious

Research Article| July 01 2010 A Lost Horizon: Perils and Possibilities of the Obvious JOHN J. McDERMOTT JOHN J. McDERMOTT Texas A&M University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Pluralist (2010) 5 (2): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.5406/pluralist.5.2.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation JOHN J. McDERMOTT; A Lost Horizon: Perils and Possibilities of the Obvious. The Pluralist 1 January 2010; 5 (2): 1–17. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/pluralist.5.2.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressThe Pluralist Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A Lost Horizon: Perils and Possibilities of the Obvious

A Lost Horizon:Perils and Possibilities of the Obvious John J. McDermott I. Gleanings: Personal and Philosophical What I say here has been said before on many days and nights by reflective persons, for centuries long and planetary wide. Why, then, say it again, Sam? Is it because Heraclitus was onto something when he told us the Logos speaks but few hear? Or is the situation that of the Hassidic tale as recounted by Martin Buber? A man took it upon himself to convey the message of the high and holy one. He found no response and so went directly, petulantly, to the author of the message. "Why are you here?" asked the high and holy one. "I have offered your message and no one hears me." "But," comes the response, "there is no hearing here for you. I have sunk my hearing in the deafness of mortals." More directly we can recall the biblical refrain, they have eyes but do not see and ears but do not hear. Of course, I include myself among the spiritually deaf and hope that however my remarks are heard or not heard, at least, I may hear them myself.1 I add that rarely is it that a profound message of any stripe, or from any source, is heard when first encountered. Certainly, that is so of my experience. The Cigar Man story, crucial to my fourth and fifth decade of life, took place when I was sixteen years of age, performing as a helper in a hopeless triage ward at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. I did not catch its message until some twenty years later when teaching an adult education course late at night on a dreary evening in a dreary building in the pressure cooker known as the City University of New York, Queens College. I was waxing eloquent about Camus and Heidegger with regard to the murky question of authenticity, when in a flash as in a flashback, I realized that the Cigar Man, a quadruple amputee with a tumescent gut, had taught me the meaning of authenticity and I missed it. For twenty years I missed the message, holding [End Page 1] it in my memory as but another vignette. When this vignette erupted and powered its way through my person, it became a story. The difference between a vignette and a story is as that between a sketch, a tease, a leitmotif, a surfing, on the one hand, and a spiritual teaching grenade on the other hand. Here now, I tell you a story even more illustrative of the time span often at work between event and message, between encounter and upshot. For this story, never having been even penumbric to my consciousness, the period of fallowness was some fifty years. The setting for this story occurs in 1989 and even retrospectively is too grim to recount in detail. Suffice to say that I went to the very bottom in every area, aspect, and sustenance of my person, ravaged by the perilous grip of clinical, acute alcoholism. Suicidal and only a few days from death by virtue of multiple organ failure, I was arrested by the county sheriff, courtesy of my adult children, and locked up. Entering under duress, a program of recovery, I was urged to consider the maxim of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, namely to survey the wreckage of my past. My addiction counselor told me that my personal, domestic, and professional abode had burned to the ground, leaving only charred wood and scarred bricks. He told me that I had to rebuild from scratch, by myself, for only a few would help, as I had the scarlet letter, due to a socially unacceptable illness—addiction. As I set out in my journey of recovering from the insane grip of clinical alcoholism, I came upon a foe heretofore not characteristic of my person. Surely, I was alert to the dangers of resentment, widely held to be the primary cause of relapse, which occurrence would have spelled my doom, my death. I went to work diluting, nay denuding my resentments, which became a difficult but doable undertaking. At first unknown to me, but soon...

Lost Chance or Lost Horizon? Strategic Opportunity and Escalation Risk in the Korean War, April–July 1951

This article examines three questions surrounding American attempts at war termination in 1951. Was there a militarily feasible ‘lost chance’ for UN forces to advance to the narrow neck of the Korean peninsula? If so, why did American decisionmakers decline to pursue it? What effect might such operations have had on the course of the war and subsequent American thinking on limited war? It concludes that the US missed a critical opportunity to conclude the war on more favorable terms; that the American decision to forgo amphibious operations in June 1951 had less to do with military calculations than with the domestic political firestorm that followed MacArthur's relief; and that the ‘lost chance’ not only increased the cost and duration of the Korean War, but encouraged subsequent decision makers to overstate the risks of intra-war escalation and understate the risks of premature, de-escalation.

Lost Horizons: Liberal Education and the LEAP Report

Lost Horizons: Liberal Education and the LEAP Report

Shangri-La and History in 1930s England

This paper addresses the question of the existence and transmission of Buddhism in British culture in the 1930s. It argues that Buddhism found channels of transmission through popular culture, such as James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Lost Horizon can be understood historically in relation to current Western ideas about Buddhism, and in response to the sense of historical crisis of Western modernity. This paper also shows that elements of a more genuine Buddhism are extracted from orientalist materials and deployed by Hilton in ways that make the novel a carrier of quasi-Buddhist ideas.

If Allah Wills It: Integration, Isolation and Muslim Authenticity in Yunnan Province in China

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes In his study of Chinese Catholicism Richard Madsen has cautioned against assuming that social institutions in China constitute civil society. Some groups may hinder rather than promote trust, openness and solidarity across the social spectrum, and if they do, Madsen (1998 Madsen R 1998 China's Catholics (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press) [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp. 13 – 15) suggests we consider them ‘uncivil’ in their orientation and social effects. The isolationist conception of Chinese Islam analysed in this paper represents a kind of ‘uncivil’ Islam, while those who stress the need for an integrated, modernising religious practice articulate a model of Chinese Islam that is civically engaged. The Hui population in Yunnan at the end of 2002 was estimated at 633,420 (see Yunnan, 2003 Yunnan 2003 Yunnan tongji nianjian bianweihui (Yunnan Statistical Yearbook Editorial Committee) (eds) 2003 Yunnan tongji nianjian (2003 Yunnan Statistical Yearbook), (Beijing, China Statistical Press) [Google Scholar], p. 677). Zhongdian County was renamed Shang-ge-li-la in 2002 after county officials ‘proved’ it was the inspiration for Shangri-la, the earthly paradise described in James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon (see Hillman, 2003 Hillman, B. 2003. Paradise under construction: minorities, myths and modernity in northwest Yunnan. Asian Ethnicity, 4, 2: pp. 175 – 88 [Google Scholar]). Muslim women in Yunnan typically pray at home, but in Haba they attend the mosque. One woman explained that their homes were primitive and ‘unsanitary’, and that it was difficult to create the clean and pure environment required for prayer. The mosque is divided into separate sections for men and women. Regarding the paradox of Ikhwan Chinese nationalism, Lipman (1994 Lipman J 1994 Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle, WA, University of Washington Press) [Google Scholar]) states that ‘[within] one generation of its fundamentalist, antiacculturalist founder, the movement had become an ally of Chinese nationalism, a tool of an acculturating Muslim elite, and an important bridge between Muslim communities and the burgeoning Chinese nation-state’ (p. 205).

Rural Cooperatives Magazine, July/August 2004

Features- Co-ops can play role for members seeking trade adjustment assistance; Compensating co-op directors; Fueling a rural revival; Great Expectations; Balancing act; Community investments help launch plant; Lost Horizon; MFA Oil committed to development and marketing of renewable fuels; Buying biodiesel ‘off the rack’ CHS investing in new injection technology to streamline biodiesel blending process; The right thing; Hard lessons; USDA grants support home-grown fuels

Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory

LIKE A DREAM. A CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE ONEIRIC METAPHOR IN FILM THEORY I know it's a cliché to say that films are like dreams -- like a collective unconscious,' Terry began, 'but I was thinking that nobody's ever really followed the idea through. There are different sorts of dreams, aren't there? And so obviously there are horror movies, which are like nightmares, and then there are dirty movies like Deep Throat and Emmanuelle, which are like wet dreams... Then there are remakes, and stories which keep getting told again and again, and those are like recurring dreams. And there are consoling, visionary dreams, like Lost Horizon or The Wizard of Oz. But when a film gets lost, and it's never been shown, and the print goes missing and nobody's ever seen it, that's the most beautiful kind of dream of all. Because that's the kind of dream that...

Magic Bullets, Lost Horizons: The Rise and Fall of Antibiotics

Magic Bullets, Lost Horizons: The Rise and Fall of Antibiotics

Lost Horizons: Rereading and Reclaiming Victorian Women Writers

"The girls of today cannot see themselves in Miss Yonge and that is their chief demand from literature" -Edith Sichel, Monthly Review, May 1901 The depths to which the reputation of popular conservative Victorian novelist, Charlotte Yonge, had sunk by the end of the nineteenth century are reflected in Oscar Wilde's reaction to being told a condemned man was reading one of Yonge's novels: "My heart was turned by the eyes of the doomed man, but if he reads The Heir of Redclyffe it's perhaps as well to let the law take its course" (Ellman 202).

The space of the dream: a case of mis‐taken identity?

This paper examines the inherent contradictions presented by locating ‘the space of the dream’. In this case it is the fictitious lamasery of Shangri‐La described by James Hilton in the novel Lost Horizon, claimed to have been inspired by a monastery to the north of Zhongdian in the Chinese province of Yunnan. Whilst some of the idyllic attributes of Hilton’s vision of paradise on Earth are grounded in the natural and cultural diversity of the entire region, contingencies of place were bound to compromise any attempt to promote any one location as such for the purposes of international tourism. If it is a case of mis‐taken identity, however, does it matter? The tourists may internalize their expectations and build a composite image of their diverse and disparate experiences which they take back home.

From Empire to Utopia: The Effacement of Colonial Markings in Lost Horizon

From Empire to Utopia: The Effacement of Colonial Markings in <i>Lost Horizon</i>

Another Frank Capra

Preface 1. Picturing Capra, Meet Frank Capra, Critical Concepts, You Can't Take It with You 2. Melodrama and the unknown woman: Forbidden 3. Questions of difference: Mr Deeds Goes to Town 4. Glimpsing the eternal: Lost Horizon 5. 'This Is a Man's World': Mr Smith Goes to Washington 6. 'To Be or Not to Be': It's a Wonderful Life Postscript: The Catastrophe of Success Notes Selected Bibliography Selected Filmography Index.

Past light cone shape and refocusing in cosmology, A Response to Michael Rauch’s ‘‘Comments on ‘Lost Horizons’ ’’ [Am. J. Phys. 63, 87 (1995)

Past light cone shape and refocusing in cosmology, A Response to Michael Rauch’s ‘‘Comments on ‘Lost Horizons’ ’’ [Am. J. Phys. <b>63</b>, 87 (1995)

Comments on ‘‘Lost Horizons’’ by G. F. R. Ellis and T. Rothman [Am. J. Phys. 61 (10), 883–893 (1993)

Comments on ‘‘Lost Horizons’’ by G. F. R. Ellis and T. Rothman [Am. J. Phys. <b>61</b> (10), 883–893 (1993)

Chang, Christopher Shang-kuan, Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, 1991. - The Lost Horizon: A Study of English Translations of the ‘Shijing’. AAC 9200600.

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