In her first book, Chong reconstructs the story of her mother's Chinese and Chinese-Canadian family, skillfully mixing social history with family biography. Using letters, public archives, interviews, and her mother's own memories, Chong creates a history rich in physical detail and emotional nuance. She begins in 1924, in Canton, when her grandmother, May-ying, a 17-year-old servant, was sold into concubinage to Chan Sam, a Chinese laborer in Vancouver. Chan Sam (Chong's grandfather) already had a wife back in Kwangtung, but he was lonely living abroad. To pay off the cost of May-ying's passage to Canada, Chan Sam indentured her to two years of work as a waitress in a teahouse in Vancouver's Chinatown. Though at first this was a sharp indignity to May-ying (waitresses were regarded as little better than prostitutes), it taught her a skill, and throughout her life she was able to find work, which Chan Sam often could not. This economic independence gave her a measure of control over, and eventually a way out of, her unhappy concubinage. Chong takes us through the couple's brief stay in China and return to Vancouver; May-ying's separation from her two oldest daughters, Nan and Ping, who were left with Chan Sam's first wife to be educated in China; the estrangement of Chan Sam and May-ying; youngest daughter Hing's often-neglected girlhood with May-ying; and the eventual reunion of Hing and Ping in China. Chong provides clear historical context. We understand Hing's painful childhood in terms of Chinese culture's ancient contempt for girl children; a seer had predicted that Hing would be a boy, and her mother was always openly disappointed. Despite her meticulous historicism, though, Chong is always attuned to the complexities of individuals, never wholly reducing anything to politics or economics. An eloquent, unsentimental act of love, prompted by the writer's contagious desire to make sense of her origins. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-82961-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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