A haunting childhood remembrance set in China’s recent past.
Su recalls the peculiarities of growing up as part of China’s one-child generation in this debut memoir.
Despite its affable title, this is a stark, striking memoir in stories recounting episodes from Su’s early years that are worlds away from the standard American notion of what a childhood should entail. For instance, the author recalls sitting at home one night in June 1989 watching a detective series on television—the government broadcast four episodes that night instead of the usual one—only to find out later that, not far from her home, the People’s Liberation Army was slaughtering protesters in Tiananmen Square. Born in 1978, just before China instituted its one-child policy, Su was the daughter of a mother who had wanted sons—she miscarried three before Su’s birth, aborted one after—which caused her to keep Su at a distance: “I once asked my mother why she never held my hand, hugged me and kissed me,” writes Su. “I remember my mother said to me she did not think it was necessary.” Su received more affection from her grandmother, though despite (or perhaps because of) this, she would often deliberately hurt the old woman’s feelings. Many of the pieces in the book concern initial experiences: the first time that Su rode a bike, or saw a sunset, or watched television. Rather than marking an addition, however, each experience seemed to whittle something away from the maturing girl. This is a book of disappearances—of a chronic, evolving sense of lack. Su writes in a detached prose that evokes the naiveté of childhood while hinting at the deeper trauma that some of these events inflicted. The result often borders on the surreal; for example, in the opening chapter, “Tiger,” the author describes a beloved pet dog that “was big, as big as a donkey, I used to sit on his back. I was about nine years old. He liked grass very much. I used to pick a lot of grass for him.” Because owning an unregistered dog was illegal, and because registration was expensive, Su’s mother decided that Tiger should be killed, so she strangled the dog in the yard while Su looked on. The next day, the family ate Tiger for dinner. “Now I love dog’s meat,” Su ends this disturbing tale. “It is the most delicious meat that I have ever had.” The fablelike perfection of some of the pieces—“Song Yali,” “Sange,” “Garden”—suggests quite a bit of authorial shaping, and as a result, some readers may be tempted to view the book as a collection of short fiction. In the end, though, the literal truth barely matters; Su so sharply captures the universal experiences of lonely youth and sets them so starkly against the austerity of 1980s China that the book delivers an artistic truth that’s powerful enough on its own. It’s a work that will sneak into one’s soul and linger there for a long time.
A haunting childhood remembrance set in China’s recent past.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4303-0338-1
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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