Virginia Pye, 中国存在于我的想象中

choi

弗吉尼亚·派伊, 中国存在于我的想象中. 纽约时报中文网, Jan 4, 2013
cn.tmagazine.com/books/20140104/t04pye/

, which is translated from

Virginia Pye, China of My Mind. New York Times, Dec 29, 2013 (blog)

Note:
(a) her novel:
Virginia Pye, River of Dust 運. Unbridled Books, 2013.
www.virginiapye.com
(b) her father:
Lucian Pye  白魯恂
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_Pye
(1921-2008; born to Congregational 公理堂/公理會 missionaries; returned to China at the end of World War II to became an intelligence officer with the 5th US Marines Corps; MIT professor)

“His [Lucian’s] father died in 1926 at age forty-eight when Lucian was only five.”

(c) “Now, the arabesques of his prose conveyed his love of those rugged plains and rolling foothills”

arabesque (n and adj; French, from Italian arabesco Arabian in fashion, from arabo Arab, from Latin Arabus)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arabesque

Originally for style of art, and later, of writing:
(i) Arabesque (Islamic art)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabesque_(Islamic_art)
(ii) Arabesque (European art)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabesque_(European_art)

(d) "Durrell’s 'The Alexandria Quartet' * * * Conrad’s 'Heart of Darkness,' Maugham’s 'Painted Veil' and Naipaul’s 'A Bend in the River' * * * The exoticism of those novels that I was taken in by turned out to reveal a complexity of culture that doesn’t easily yield to an outsider’s”
(i) The Alexandria Quartet
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alexandria_Quartet(novels by British writer Lawrence Durrell, published between 1957 and 1960; Alexandria, Egypt)
(ii) Heart of Darkness
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Darkness
(a short novel by Joseph Conrad [a Pole, with Polish name, born in then Imperial Russia but moved to England])
(iii) Painted Veil (novel)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Veil_(novel)
(a 1925 novel by British author W. Somerset Maugham; The title is taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet)
(iv) A Bend in the River
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bend_in_the_River
(a 1979 novel by Nobel laureate VS Naipaul [a British writer born and raised in Trinidad, whose grandparents came to Trinidad separately from india])
(v) take in (vt):
"to receive into the mind : PERCEIVE <took in the view>
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/take%20in

(e)
(i) The English surname Pye: “Middle English, Old French pie, pye ‘magpie’ (Latin pica), applied as a nickname for a talkative or thievish person. The modern English name [word] of the bird, not found before the 17th century, is from the earlier dialect term maggot-pie, formed by the addition of Mag, Maggot, pet forms of the female personal name Margaret”
(ii) The English (Norman) surname Durrell: “a diminutive of Old French dur ‘hard(y)’”

(f) "Aleksandar Hemon says that 'expertise is the enemy of imagination'”  

Aleksandar Hemon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandar_Hemon
(1964- ; Bostonian; born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then Yugoslavia, to a father of partial Ukrainian and Bosnian descent and a Bosnian mother; Since 1992 he has lived in the United States)