An inspiring life story of unvanquished resilience.
An educator and scholar recounts her journey from war-torn China to a new life in Taiwan.
Born in 1924, Chi (Emerita, English/National Taiwan Univ.; The Last of the Whampoa Breed: Stories of the Chinese Diaspora, 2003, etc.) grew up in Manchuria, where her father was a prominent member of the anti-Japanese resistance. Her richly detailed memoir palpably conveys the violence and fears that marked her youth. Japan’s bellicose incursions into China resulted in “relentless and violent bombings,” and her family repeatedly was on the move. By the time she was 13, she admits, she was filled with ardent patriotic fervor and anger. Life in China was precarious: Students and teachers at the Sun Yat-sen Middle School, founded by her father, were forced to change locations frequently, during which the boys lived in caves and the girls in thatch shacks, while her father desperately tried to find a place—indoors or outdoors—to hold classes. Chi’s modest, serene prose belies the many physical and emotional hardships of her youth. “Every day the sun would rise as usual,” she writes, “but in the sunshine survival was a luxury.” Education sustained her, especially literature, which helped to foster her “fiercely unconquerable spirit.” In 1947, Chi left China, where “the whole country was caught up in a political whirlpool” between left and right. With a literature degree, she took a position as a teaching assistant at National Taiwan University and began an illustrious career as an educator, translator, and scholar, which included winning two Fulbright fellowships to teach and study in the United States; guest teaching positions in Hong Kong, the U.S., and Berlin; appointment to the National Institute of Compilation and Translation, where she made contemporary works of Chinese literature available globally and oversaw the compilation of new Chinese textbooks that excluded propaganda. Through her teaching, writing, and presentations, she helped to define Taiwan as “a free and democratic nation, preserving a high degree of Chinese culture, while pursuing peace and prosperity.”
An inspiring life story of unvanquished resilience.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-231-18840-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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