A notable historical document and a vivid, affecting portrait of a young woman’s resolve.
Composed in beautiful English, this remarkable memoir by a former Chinese factory worker delineates her efforts to buck the strictures of socialism and broaden her life’s experience.
Western readers accustomed to self-determination will be shocked to read how little control the average Chinese person has over his or her life. In 1980, Zhang was a promising student hoping to become a journalist when her mother announced that the 16-year-old would be replacing her as a worker at the Liming Machinery Factory. Having labored at the missile factory her entire life, supporting her three children mostly on her own while her husband worked in another city, Ma was taking advantage of dingzhi, a policy put in effect after the collapse of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 that aimed to alleviate soaring unemployment by allowing children to take over their retiring parents’ jobs. Zhang didn’t want to be a worker, but because her father had “political problems,” her chances of access to a university education or any other means of bettering her lot were slim. Forced to quit school and become a gauge reader at the detested factory, she was apprenticed to several “masters” who taught her how to wile away the empty work hours, spy on others and trick the system. Zhang effectively conveys the emotional life of her younger self as she squelched her resentment and even made friends among the other workers, while never ceasing to read voraciously and to look for an opportunity for escape. Her braininess allowed her to study mechanical engineering at the Jiangsu TV University (a “new type of college…designed to popularize learning”); her various love affairs enlightened her; learning English became her Marxist “tool of struggle.” The democratic movement of 1989, treated somewhat hastily here, brought her both exhilaration and chastisement.
A notable historical document and a vivid, affecting portrait of a young woman’s resolve.Pub Date: April 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9777433-7-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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