Daughter of the River

Rating:
Summary: A Letter to the Author: .. Touches my heart deeply..
Review: A page-turner that left me feeling hollow with the numbing emotional emptiness that gripped the tender young life that was exposed in the book.

The only solace during the read is the knowledge that the author had somehow transcended her apparent fate to be able to create the well-written biography.

In the end, satisfied that the author has found her own place of peace (she has become a successful author, after all), I was left wondering the fate of her impossibly burdened family.

Hong Ying, wherever you are, I hope you have found all of the emotional fulfillment you deserve. You have demonstrated a remarkable capacity not only for surviving, but for understanding and sharing feelings that are more painful and profound than most of us will ever have to experience.

In a way, I feel reading this allowed me to grow emotionally.

Rating:
Summary: Agonising
Review: I cannot say that I enjoyed reading this book ... it was too raw to bring pleasure. But it did keep me captivated until the end. I felt that I wanted to reach out to Hong Ying and comfort her in some way as she lived through such excruciating poverty and endured the even greater agony of not feeling loved. I hope that she has found love and is at peace now. I also wonder about the fate of her family. Did they ever find release from such grinding poverty?

Hong Ying obviously has a great talent and I look forward to reading more of her writings.

Rating:
Summary: Agonising
Review: I cannot say that I enjoyed reading this book ... it was too raw to bring pleasure. But it did keep me captivated until the end. I felt that I wanted to reach out to Hong Ying and comfort her in some way as she lived through such excruciating poverty and endured the even greater agony of not feeling loved. I hope that she has found love and is at peace now. I also wonder about the fate of her family. Did they ever find release from such grinding poverty?

Hong Ying obviously has a great talent and I look forward to reading more of her writings.

Rating:
Summary: How do you fit so much pain into beautiful words?
Review: It is true that this autobiography is bleak. It is dark, but it is a reflection of the poverty and oppression experienced by the peasant class in China, now and all during the rule of the Communist regime. How Hong Ying is able to evoke absolute beauty from this seemingly unending ugliness is beyond me. But she expertly does just that. Without thought or pretense, Hong Ying's writing sings immaculately from the page. Amazing prose. This book's importance lies in that it is the story of someone from the peasant class, and since it is always good to hear all different perspectives of the same or similar events in order to get a good all around picture of the times, Hong Ying's book is a must read. In commenting on the book to a friend, I said that perhaps Hong Ying and her family's saving grace was that they were already at the bottom of the totem pole. Because of this they didn't have to experience the worst of what the Cultural Revolution had to offer eventhough it touched their lives daily. The peasant class of China is what Mao Zedong strived to make all the people of China in the name of proletarianism. The fact that Hong Ying and her family were already of this class meant that many of the dynamics of the time that were sweeping through all classes above them settled into their class as normalcy somewhat. It's like a line from Joan Chen's movie "Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl;" at one point when Xiu Xiu is questioning where she is being sent, she is told that it doesn't matter because it's the same everywhere; a simple statement but poignant in just how dead on right it is. Therefore, you must appreciate even moreso when we are allowed to read of these events by all those who were a part of them be it peasant or merchant. If it's done well, it is the most captivating of things to read because it means they made it out and are able to share it with us now. Before, any scraps of paper containing this type of writing would have been confiscated and burned, a black mark put in your file, or perhaps you'd be arrested. Hong Ying has done a brilliant job telling of her coming into womanhood in those times and of the exuberant curiosity she had about her family and herself, always having been treated as the outsider.

Rating:
Summary: I had no problem putting it down
Review: The non linar approach kept me thinking there would be some big supprizing reward at the end of the book. To my disappointment there was no such revolation. Not an awfully written story but certinally no prize winner in my book!

Rating:
Summary: purple prose, weak melodrama
Review: Whats annoying is that the author passes this all off as autobigraphical and historically true, when it is NOT. YH was/is from a very elite background, and like other expats making bucks off of US readers in search of melodramas of oppressed Chinese, this works poorly as history or politics. MOreover, the prose is labored and purple, though this might be the translation's fault.