Into China's Heart

Rating:
Summary: a little Gem of a travelog
Review: I found the book in a little one room bookstore, in the basement of a very small country town's library. My wife insists she can't take me anywhere without stopping at every little used bookstore or thriftstore, she's undoubtably right. But this book assures that i will continue this practice for it is a gem of a book.

From the outside, the back cover, inside blurbs, random page meanderings, it looks like an Overseas Chinese returns to her birthplace with the idea of tracing "China's Sorrow", the Yellow River. In itself this is a noble and interesting idea for a book and a travel. However in her capable and thoughtful hands this idea becomes something much more, a social commentary but an asute and careful observer of the human condition. So the form is a commentary on her travels and travails but it borders closely on travel essays outlining what makes the Chinese so Chinese, from kindof on the outside, born Chinese but Western in outlook and fundamental beliefs.

For it is these observations, not lengthy polemical pages but these little snippets as she thinks outloud about what she is seeing and experiencing, that make it an extraordinary and deeply likeable book. I've read whole books on the burden that 5000 years of history puts on the Chinese, but her sentences describing a man carrying a heavy carved for-export tablet make these ideas so real. I have read several good books on China and this rates with the best of them for the talent and insight that the author demonstrates while just talking about a young women who befriends her and their conflicts with the ever-observant government.

Her descriptions of train rides, bureaucrats, the eroded soil, the shifting sands, are persuasive and deserve a read by anyone interested in China or recent Chinese history(book dated 1985). It is an absorbing and nice read, accessible to anyone with the slightest care for history or social commentary. Thanks to the competent and people-aware author, i look forward to getting another book by her.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Reccomended as an exceptionally well-written and intelligent book for those interested in Chinese history, culture, geography, lifestyle, and the Yellow River. The author is a native Shanghaise who left China with her family when she was ten-years-old. The book is a travel narrative written in the early 1980's. Pan is a witty and incisive observer of her own people; she resembles V.S. Naipaul in many ways. Having lived in China for two years I found her portrait (although now dated) precise. The book follows Pan's travels throught China as she follows the Yellow River from its source to the sea.