An overstuffed but often absorbing journey through the Chinese experience.
Chinese migrants weather war, revolution, and discrimination in America in this sweeping historical meditation.
Aston combines third-person narrative, personal recollections, and interviews into a multifaceted look at Chinese people at home and abroad. Episodes from Chinese history provide background, starting with the 19th-century Opium Wars and other Western incursions, the nationalist revolution of 1911 and the troubled rule of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Guomindang Party, Japan’s invasion during World War II, and the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party during the Chinese civil war. These upheavals, along with persistent poverty and periodic famines, sent millions of people abroad seeking better lives. The author weaves in the saga of diaspora Chinese, particularly Chinese Americans, exploring their endurance of hard labor and racial bigotry and their evasions of exclusionary American immigration laws. (Many came to the country as “paper sons,” arranging to be falsely claimed as children of Chinese American citizens.) The book also looks at the political rivalries that roiled the Chinese American community. Aston enriches the history with first-person reminiscences of life in San Francisco’s Chinatown by his two Chinese American spouses and their extended families—a colorful bunch who included a professional-gambler father-in-law who was an associate of Chinese criminal gangs and two uncles-in-law who were prominent Communist Party figures with voluminous FBI files. He also throws in recollections of his own extensive travels to Asia—as a sailor on freighters in the 1950s, as a State Department employee in the ’60s, and on his own time in 1986. Aston’s lengthy, often disjointed text goes off on many tangents, including a discussion of black-lung disease among British coal miners and the mechanics of shipboard smuggling. Fortunately, he keeps these excursions engaging with his wide-ranging curiosity, erudition, and evocative prose; for example, he observes that, in Calcutta, “files of dark, scrawny Bengali longshoremen, clad only in a scrap of dhoti around their loins and a sweat rag around their neck, unload upcountry boats” while “vultures gorge on the carcass of a cow.” Readers with a casual interest in China will enjoy browsing this book, and scholars will find a trove of information on immigrant lives.
An overstuffed but often absorbing journey through the Chinese experience.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72032-736-3
Page Count: 740
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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