MixedNew York TimesPang’s book feels timely and urgent. Her argument starts here, in the room with the mushrooms, and goes like this: that the way we consume is unsustainable; that something as seemingly trivial as paper mushrooms and Halloween decorations are entangled in a system that hides atrocity by design and makes complicity — with authoritarian governments, with dangerous working conditions and even with religious persecution — part of modern life. Pang, a freelance journalist who grew up in a Mandarin-speaking household, is most effective when she is drawing out these juxtapositions, putting production and torture matter-of-factly side by side ... Made in China gets off to a rocky start; Pang does not hit her stride until a few chapters in ... This opening conceit dissolves quickly and the early pages of Pang’s book race through Sun’s childhood and, at the same time, survey decades of Chinese history in passages that are sometimes sweeping and reductive.
Megan K. Stack
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewStack is unflinching in her account ... her prose is beautiful ... At its best moments, Stack’s book is a sharply observed, evocative reckoning with the ways her struggles intersect and diverge with those of the women she employs. As it progresses, however, her own narrative overshadows those of the women she wishes to reveal. She shows us how we have ignored these women and exploited them. She names the difference, but as readers we do not get to travel across it.
