Quick, colorful glances at a rich culture.
A writer offers autobiographical vignettes, short stories, and reflections on Chinese culture and history.
In this book, Yu (Two Swordmasters, 2018, etc.) reveals that her “official and reported” birth date in north China is April 1, 1939. A self-described “unwanted girl child,” she was born after the Nanjing Massacre, when Japanese troops murdered an estimated 3 million Chinese people in a matter of weeks. Her father had been captured by the Japanese to work as an interpreter while her busy mother kept eight children safe from the Japanese army. In 1949, Yu’s family escaped from Communist China to Taiwan. Many years later, the author wrote columns for an American newspaper, the Pueblo Chieftain, and dreamed of publishing a book about China. After battling cancer in 2006, she was determined to realize her dream and pass down stories to her grandchildren. The end result is this heartfelt compilation of childhood memories and tales about Chinese culture and history. Divided into two parts, the book’s first section presents 16 easy-reading selections: autobiographical pieces, short stories, and essays. Sometimes the volume feels like an informative classroom lecture; for example, in the essay “Three Chinese Poems,” Yu briefly discusses classical Chinese poetry. Other works are much more personal. Once, on a terrible train ride, Yu’s mother hid from Japanese soldiers by disguising herself as a man and her daughters as boys. The author also paints a memorable portrait of the outmoded custom of foot binding. In “My Mother’s Big Feet,” Yu’s mother—whose forward-thinking father wouldn’t allow her feet to be bound—was ridiculed her entire life for having “big” (smaller than size 5) feet. And the tender reflections in “A snowy night in Canada” chronicle the author’s struggles to raise her daughters alone. The second section presents 41 newspaper articles with details that should leave a lasting impression on readers of all ages. For example, “The Archer and the Moon Goddess” explains why ceramic rabbits are popular gifts for children during the moon festival. While they are not chronological, these succinct works are easy to browse, and Yu’s lively prose brings her subjects to life.
Quick, colorful glances at a rich culture.Pub Date: July 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984543-08-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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