Ms. Guo’s memoir offers a haunting account of how China’s rapid shift from Maoist ideology to market-driven growth has simultaneously created extraordinary opportunities for the Chinese people and intensified their craving for meaning and purpose in the face of continuing authoritarian controls ... She is especially vivid—and funny—in describing the moments when her childhood intersected with high politics ... Nine Continents shows the rewards of listening to an unleashed voice remembering and speaking with full freedom.
Aside from the fast-paced plot, this is most interesting for its probing portrayal of Guo’s ambivalent relationship with her homeland ... Nonetheless she doesn’t sentimentalise China or her life there. An impressive feature of this moving and often exhilarating book is the brutality of her portrait of her parents ... The question here is what kind of loyalty we owe those bound to us by blood. It is not coincidental, Guo thinks, that the protagonists of all her favourite novels have been orphans — 'parentless, self-made heroes.' This is her myth, too, but her strength lies in her acknowledged ambivalence. Even as she escapes gravity and floats into the future, she feels the obstinacy of the roots that pull her back into the past.
Nine Continents is a compelling and often startling read, written in a direct style with a few moments of sentimentality. Guo intersperses scenes from a Buddhist folk tale throughout the book, providing a dreamy feel to an often hard-edged story. While she does discuss the many influences on her artistic life, Guo does not really reflect on her practice. It feels strange that a prolific novelist and filmmaker would exclude discussing her many works in English and Chinese. What Guo does detail is the quest for freedom in a changing communist China, the anguished pull of family, and the loneliness of a new immigrant. Ultimately, the memoir is a feminist meditation on the yearning to balance individuality with belonging and find a home.
Nine Continents doesn't pull any punches. Guo begins by delving into her impoverished childhood in the coastal fishing village of Shitang. Her early life with her grandparents is characterized by a hardscrabble existence in which she's ravenous. Her finely tuned, descriptive prose captures the austerity of peasant life ... Nine Continents shines much-needed light on the struggle of modern Chinese citizens to be free artistically and intellectually ... Piercing and poignant, Nine Continents serves as a bridge between two worlds and demonstrates the hardship of immigration but also the value of multiculturalism.
Although undoubtedly Guo’s most resonant book to date, Nine Continents is not without literary flaws, from needless repetitions to bombastic declarations of 'never' that don’t stick. Missteps aside, what remains is a viscerally affecting narrative in which Guo shares four decades of all the ways that being a woman – herself as daughter, sister, lover, and others as wife, mother, grandmother – has caused damage, humiliation, and tragedy.
…[a] tumultuous memoir that scales not only continents, but cultural and emotional landscapes, too … Guo’s eye is sharp and fearless — as are her actions and this book — for what could possibly terrify her that she hasn’t already experienced? ‘The landscape made me merciless and aggressive,’ she writes. And indeed, it did … Guo’s is a mythic journey: from poverty to fecundity, from communism to capitalism, from the ‘we’ to the ‘I,’ from inside to outside, the latter culminating in her leaving behind a harrowing past. How can a human endure so much with so little and still end up a celebrated author and filmmaker? The answers lie within the pages of this book.
In evocative, captivating prose that reads like fiction, Guo brings to life her lifelong struggles against the chains of poverty, gender, and censorship. A talented wordsmith, she unabashedly lays bare her personal history with raw emotion and unflinching honesty, and she is unafraid to express her anger, disappointment, or joy at every turn. A rich and insightful coming-of-age story of not only a woman, but an artist and the country in which she was born.
