Sensitive, fascinating reports.
Novelistic anecdotes reveal Chinese young people struggling with universal themes of education, employment, and love.
In alternating chapters, Beijing-based British journalist Ash (co-editor: While We're Here: China Stories from a Writers' Colony, 2016) pursues the mostly unglamorous, daily slogs of six young Chinese, born from 1985 to 1990, and how, as the single-child generation, they are making their ways in the new China. Initially, readers must work to remember which character is which, and some have English nicknames. There is art student Xiaoxiao, from the northernmost Heilongjiang province; academically gifted Fred, the daughter of Communist party apparatchiks in China’s far south island, Hainan; gaming addict Snail, from Anhui province; Dahai, from Wuhan, who was forced to study computer science and settled for a stable team-leader position building a tunnel under Beijing; Mia, a rebel who scored a stylist job at the Chinese edition of Harper’s Bazaar; and Lucifer, who scraped by at Peking University and only wanted to be a rock star. Each dreamed of the good life, undergoing the rigorous exams for university and attending college and then joining the massive work force as “just another worker ant.” Some, like Snail and Dahai, discovered power in venting on the internet (“reposting is power”). Lucifer found gratification in joining bands and screaming English lyrics, and Mia delved into the fashionista club scene. Forced to live frugally, Snail inhabited one of the tiny spaces in the basements of cheap apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city, living with other members of the underclass called the “rat tribe.” Fred, a graduate student in politics, did a year abroad at Cornell University; while she was intrigued by the American way, she was not tempted to stay. By their late 20s, all young people are expected to get married; a few of Ash’s subjects obliged, to enormous cost and fanfare by their delighted parents. Ultimately, the author eloquently delineates the dreams and disappointments of young Chinese.
Sensitive, fascinating reports.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-764-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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