Archive for Memoir
June 3, 2007 at 10:10 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Memoir, Travel Diary
Red China Blues by Jan Wong (Memoir, Travel Diary)
When I knew I was going to be dog-sitting (and house-sitting) for my aunt this week in St. Catharines, I asked another aunt to collect any good world lit she had lying around and drop it off at the house for me so I’d have something to do this week. This book was one of them.
I first heard about Red China Blues at a sleepover, where my (Chinese) best friend and I got into an argument with our (white) friend about whether the book was a fair treatment of communism in general, or of the communist regime in China. Since we were only fourteen and none of the three of us had ever read the book, and didn’t know much about communism that we hadn’t learned from our respective parents, I was prepared to give the book a try even though at the time I wasn’t much impressed with the third-hand summary we got from our friend.
This time, though, my fourteen-year-old instincts were right on the money in recognizing a book that would only get on my nerves. Jan Wong is a Chinese-Canadian journalist, who has written for the Globe & Mail, Canada’s premier national newspaper. She was born and raised in Montreal, Canada, and was a Maoist when she first visited China in the early 70’s. She was disillusioned after witnessing some of the horrors of life under the communist government, including the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square.
I didn’t get very far into Red China Blues, so I don’t want to dismiss it as worthless. I’m even interested in reading about her experiences, but I just don’t trust her as a narrator. It’s hard to explain why—something about the self-absorbtion of her account, about the way she’s so insistent about how foolish and misguided she was to be a Maoist, how deceived the world was about China in those days. Which may be true, but—and how can I put this delicately…? Get over it. I’m sort of interested in whether the book gets any better, but not enough to irritate myself by continuing with it when I have so many other great books to read this week. I may pick it up again some rainy day—it is very readable.
Tags: DNF
June 3, 2007 at 1:10 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Memoir, Travel Diary, World Literature
48. Sky Burial by Xinran (Travel Diary, Memoir) 161 p.
World Lit Challenge: Tibet
I’ve wanted to read this ever since I realized, not all that long ago, that the author of The Good Women of China had written another book. Sky Burial definitely lived up to my expectations.
In 1994, Xinran travels from Nanjing, where she works as a journalist, to Suzhou, in hopes of meeting a woman she has been told has a story she might be interested in hearing. She spends two days listening to Shu Wen, a Chinese woman who left for Tibet in 1958, at the age of 26, hoping to find her husband Wang Kejun, who was reported dead by the Liberation Army, for whom he worked as a doctor. She doesn’t return to China until 1994.
Books read: 48/50
Pages read: 13,556/25,000
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, World Lit Challenge, Xinran
January 29, 2007 at 1:33 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Memoir, Non-fiction, World Literature
34. The Good Women of China by Xinran (memoir)
World Lit Challenge: China
During the relatively open period in the 1990s, Xinran was the presenter of a popular radio show, Words on the Night Breeze. When she became interested in learning more about the lives of her fellow Chinese women, her position as a journalist and her ability to gain the trust of these women allowed her to hear many stories about their lives. The book was published in England after she moved there in 1997.
Xinran had me hooked when she explained, in her prologue, that she had risked her life fighting off a mugger in London in order to preserve her manuscript because she wasn’t sure she would be willing or able to recreate it:
However, I wasn’t sure that I could put myself through the extremes of feeling provoked by writing the book again. Reliving the stories of the women I had met had been painful, and it had been harder still to order my memories and find language adequate to express them. In fighting for that bag, I was defending my feelings, and the feelings of Chinese women. The book was the result of so many things which, once lost, could never be found again. When you walk into your memories, you are opening a door to the past; the road within has many branches, and the route is different every time.
After reading the rest of the book, I understand where she’s coming from. The stories she recounts, from personal interviews with Chinese women, phone calls to the radio station, and letters from her listeners, are heart-wrenching. A large part of the appeal of this book is that she doesn’t forget that she too is a Chinese woman. Stories of her life growing up during the Cultural Revolution are woven into her narrative.
The stories in The Good Women of China cover many aspects of women’s lives in China, from marriage and children to rape and sexual abuse, from religion to mental illness, from love to suicide. Xinran’s writing is always engaging, and the stories are gripping even when they are tragic.
I read this for my personal World Lit Challenge, and it’s a perfect choice for any similar challenge.
Books read: 34/300
Pages read: 8,631/75,000
X-posted here.
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, World Lit Challenge, Xinran
January 11, 2007 at 11:09 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Memoir, World Literature
3. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (Memoir)
World Lit Challenge: Iran
From the back of the book:
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads stages arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories became intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.
I can’t say this book did much for me. I was very excited to read it, because I’ve heard many good things about it, but I just couldn’t get into it.
Part of it is that I had real trouble keeping the people and events straight in my head. The author seemed to jump around a lot from one time frame to another, and if I put the book down for a day or two, I couldn’t remember who anybody was. I don’t know why; I usually have an excellent memory for books.
I also think Nafisi’s writing style had something to do with it. It just didn’t enthral me. Although I was interested in what she was writing about, I had to force myself to finish the book. Perhaps memoirs just aren’t for me - I like to be caught up in the plot of a novel, to feel like the story is going somewhere. That’s what keeps me reading, and I didn’t get that feeling from Reading Lolita in Tehran.
So, yeah, I wouldn’t discourage anyone from reading it. I feel like the reasons I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have have less to do with its merits as a novel and more to do with my preferences as a reader. Which I suppose is usually true when I write a review, but I’ve rarely felt it more strongly than now.
Books read: 3/50
Pages read: 834
Next on the list:
- The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
- Obasan by Joy Kogawa
- Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
- The Wars by Timothy Findley
- Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay
X-posted to here.
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Azar Nafisi, World Lit Challenge
