A young American woman sets out to discover Chinese women's lives and recovers her own; her story is painstakingly observed and gracefully rendered. In 1987, a year and a half before the Tiananmen Square massacre, Checkoway graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She and her boyfriend, a graduate student suffering form long-term writer's block and unable to finish his dissertation, fled to China. They brought their relationship—already unhappy in Iowa—to the more desolate landscape of Shijiazhuang, a sooty industrial city. Checkoway, a university English teacher, wanted to learn about the lives of Chinese women. It took some time to get past party lines and demure silences, but she eventually found friendship and stories among the women of Shijiazhuang. She met Fan Chun, whose hand was disfigured during the Cultural Revolution while she was working in a truck factory run by incompetent ideologues; Gao, who had written an autobiographical novel about her struggle to be a good Communist, though torn by her love of Buddhism; An, who was searching furiously for a foreigner to marry because she was determined to leave China. In learning about the women, Checkoway learned about herself. China had at first provided a way for her to escape from her own life. (In that context, she remembered that as a child, after her mother died, her grandmother used to send her out to play in the backyard, exhorting her to ``dig to China.'') But her life in China and the stories of her friends insistently brought her back to her past: She recovered her own forgotten stories, too—the loss of her mother, her father's remarriage, and his abandonment of his children. A lyrical contribution to the body of young-American-abroad memoirs—as inspiring as Andrea Lee's Russian Journal and Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-84878-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others.
The debut book from “one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard.”
In addition to delivering memorable portraits of undocumented immigrants residing precariously on Staten Island and in Miami, Cleveland, Flint, and New Haven, Cornejo Villavicencio, now enrolled in the American Studies doctorate program at Yale, shares her own Ecuadorian family story (she came to the U.S. at age 5) and her anger at the exploitation of hardworking immigrants in the U.S. Because the author fully comprehends the perils of undocumented immigrants speaking to journalist, she wisely built trust slowly with her subjects. Her own undocumented status helped the cause, as did her Spanish fluency. Still, she protects those who talked to her by changing their names and other personal information. Consequently, readers must trust implicitly that the author doesn’t invent or embellish. But as she notes, “this book is not a traditional nonfiction book….I took notes by hand during interviews and after the book was finished, I destroyed those notes.” Recounting her travels to the sites where undocumented women, men, and children struggle to live above the poverty line, she reports her findings in compelling, often heart-wrenching vignettes. Cornejo Villavicencio clearly shows how employers often cheat day laborers out of hard-earned wages, and policymakers and law enforcement agents exist primarily to harm rather than assist immigrants who look and speak differently. Often, cruelty arrives not only in economic terms, but also via verbal slurs and even violence. Throughout the narrative, the author explores her own psychological struggles, including her relationships with her parents, who are considered “illegal” in the nation where they have worked hard and tried to become model residents. In some of the most deeply revealing passages, Cornejo Villavicencio chronicles her struggles reconciling her desire to help undocumented children with the knowledge that she does not want "kids of my own." Ultimately, the author’s candor about herself removes worries about the credibility of her stories.
A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-59268-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
The author’s literate, committed voice sometimes disappears in his tangled wood of allusion and quotation.
The veteran Washington Post columnist and TV commentator offers a richly documented history of and argument for a wider embrace of conservative political values.
“Richly documented” is an understatement. Will (A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred, 2014, etc.) is nothing if not a thorough, dedicated researcher and thinker, but he’s often prolix. Many of the historical figures the author references will come as no surprise—e.g., Burke, Moynihan, Madison, Locke—and there are also plenty from the literary world; these include allusions to Twain and Fitzgerald, whose closing sentences from The Great Gatsby provide Will with a metaphor for his principal points. Not much the Pulitzer winner offers here will surprise those who have paid attention to his rhetoric over the decades. His three American heroes remain: Washington, Lincoln, John Marshall. He thinks the U.S. government has grown too big, that it is too interested in providing entitlements (Will is a believer in much more self-reliance than he sees evident today), that schools and universities should do a much more rigorous job of transmitting the Western historical heritage, and that progressives just don’t understand how America is supposed to work. However, in one chapter, he may surprise some readers: He declares he is an atheist (though “amiable, low-voltage”), and he spends a few pages reminding us that the founders were not particularly religious and that we must observe the separation of church and state. He praises the civil rights movement but asserts that much of it has gone wrong. Oddly missing are direct references to the current occupant of the White House, though Will does zing many of his predecessors (from both parties but principally Democrats), mostly for their failure to comprehend fully the concept of liberty that fueled the founders.
The author’s literate, committed voice sometimes disappears in his tangled wood of allusion and quotation.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48093-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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