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
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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