A candid, rewarding memoir that achieves both distance and intimacy.
Toronto journalist Wong (Beijing Confidential, 2007, etc.) recounts an extended trip she took to China to seek out a fellow student she had denounced during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1972, self-described “Montreal Maoist” Wong was invited to study at Beijing University. The 19-year-old, third-generation Chinese-Canadian was the first student there from the Great White North since the start of the Cultural Revolution. As a True Believer, she was the perfect guinea pig to restart an international student exchange, even though she did not then speak Mandarin. Indeed, she was such an enthusiastic collaborator in her own brainwashing, she admits, that she denounced a Chinese student, Yin, who confided that she wanted to get to America. Yin was subsequently expelled, and the author lost all trace of her. Guilt over her plight continued to plague Wong, and she resolved to track down Yin and apologize. In August 2006, the 53-year-old author boarded a plane with her white husband (whose Chinese name she humorously translates as Fat Paycheck) and her two reluctant teenaged sons. In search of Yin, she tracked down old acquaintances at the university, bouncing among cell-phone numbers in the new Beijing, where change was the only constant. Along the way, she confronted the great void left by the Maoist era. After Chinese society’s stunning about-face from fanatically revolutionary to zealously capitalist, participants in the Cultural Revolution had opted for collective amnesia, and 28 years of university records simply didn’t exist. Wong’s memoir offers a penetrating, frequently hilarious glimpse inside this teeming culture of wily rule-breakers and bargain-hunters on the eve of the 2008 Olympics, as Beijing was transformed by cataclysmic construction. Her private journey proved fruitful, allowing the author to explore a painful, confusing past, soothe old wounds and seek clarity and catharsis.
A candid, rewarding memoir that achieves both distance and intimacy.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101342-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
