A riveting narrative of little-known Chinese history.
In her serenely composed debut memoir, native daughter Lum provides a rare, compelling glimpse of Singapore during WWII.
Her father came to “the Lion City” in 1919, when his widowed mother decided to leave the island of Hainan and educate her four-year-old son to become an interpreter. She died shortly after he married at age 16, and the young couple was forced to move in with the bride’s mother, Popo. A disapproving old dictator, trained in herbal medicine and steeped in ancient superstition, she ruled the household; it was Popo who named the author Miew-yong (Subtle Lotus) upon her birth in 1933. As Father’s salary improved, the family steadily moved to nicer neighborhoods. His growing prosperity enabled Popo to marry off her unlovely second daughter to a government employee and to purchase—and roundly abuse—several muichai, girls sold into servitude by their families. Meanwhile, Lum’s mother embarked on a life of leisure and neglect of her girls; one daughter died of abuse, another was given up for adoption. Miew-yong became keenly aware of the ruling matriarchs’ double standard: She and her sisters were relentlessly blamed and beaten, while their two brothers were indulged. British colonial rule collapsed with the 1942 invasion of the Japanese, who oppressed and tortured Singapore’s various ethnic groups over the next three-and-a-half years. Father’s work as a translator largely spared the family from starvation, but the humiliation heaped on him by his mother-in-law and wife drove him to drink; he died at the end of the war. When Mother entered into a liaison with a married man who persuaded her to make disastrous financial decisions, it was hardworking Miew-yong and her sister who (barely) held the family together. Now living in London, Lum subtly champions the will of a young girl who refused to be silenced.
A riveting narrative of little-known Chinese history.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-58648-436-1
Page Count: 242
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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