A candid balance of perseverance and despair.
A woman’s restless, often anguished journey from rural China to an American economic-consulting firm.
Shen was born to illiterate farmers in a commune-controlled hamlet along the Yangtze River. Starved for love from her parents, who were exhausted from long hours planting rice shoots in the fields, Shen found an outlet from the misery in her schoolwork. At age 17, she became the first in her family to attend college, which she soon discovered was nothing like the self-empowering Wellesley College campus she would eventually know. Instead, it was a set of cement buildings in which students simply went through the motions, having been guaranteed a teaching job for life by the government. Smart and ambitious, Shen performed well, but upon graduation lacked the money to bribe the Education Bureau for placement anywhere better than a suffocatingly small village not far from her own hamlet. As an impoverished English teacher, she fought the loneliness by sleeping with men for companionship while cursing herself for becoming a whore like her mother, who was carrying on a decade-long affair. Shen became pregnant by a married businessman, who smuggled her into the hospital for an abortion (without anesthesia)—the painful description of the event is haunting. The author finally scraped together enough money to visit booming Shanghai in 1995, which inspired her to join other desperate Chinese in “jumping in the ocean”—“giving up governmental jobs and joining the free market” in South China. Defying her parents, she worked as a secretary and Amway salesgirl before returning indebted and covered in lice. A translating job at a knitting company led to opportunities that finally made her rich—but not without moral sacrifice, a requisite (especially for women) in the corrupt business world of New China. Wealthy but still emotionally lost, Shen finally sought and found reconciliation with her family, as well as marriage to an American she met online.
A candid balance of perseverance and despair.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56947-586-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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