An inspiring life story of unvanquished resilience.
An educator and scholar recounts her journey from war-torn China to a new life in Taiwan.
Born in 1924, Chi (Emerita, English/National Taiwan Univ.; The Last of the Whampoa Breed: Stories of the Chinese Diaspora, 2003, etc.) grew up in Manchuria, where her father was a prominent member of the anti-Japanese resistance. Her richly detailed memoir palpably conveys the violence and fears that marked her youth. Japan’s bellicose incursions into China resulted in “relentless and violent bombings,” and her family repeatedly was on the move. By the time she was 13, she admits, she was filled with ardent patriotic fervor and anger. Life in China was precarious: Students and teachers at the Sun Yat-sen Middle School, founded by her father, were forced to change locations frequently, during which the boys lived in caves and the girls in thatch shacks, while her father desperately tried to find a place—indoors or outdoors—to hold classes. Chi’s modest, serene prose belies the many physical and emotional hardships of her youth. “Every day the sun would rise as usual,” she writes, “but in the sunshine survival was a luxury.” Education sustained her, especially literature, which helped to foster her “fiercely unconquerable spirit.” In 1947, Chi left China, where “the whole country was caught up in a political whirlpool” between left and right. With a literature degree, she took a position as a teaching assistant at National Taiwan University and began an illustrious career as an educator, translator, and scholar, which included winning two Fulbright fellowships to teach and study in the United States; guest teaching positions in Hong Kong, the U.S., and Berlin; appointment to the National Institute of Compilation and Translation, where she made contemporary works of Chinese literature available globally and oversaw the compilation of new Chinese textbooks that excluded propaganda. Through her teaching, writing, and presentations, she helped to define Taiwan as “a free and democratic nation, preserving a high degree of Chinese culture, while pursuing peace and prosperity.”
An inspiring life story of unvanquished resilience.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-231-18840-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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