Yan’s reminiscences — translated in simple, fluid style from the original French, the short chapters prefaced by insightful, often beautiful phrases from various writers — are not sequential. She travels back and forth, interweaving affectionate pen portraits of grandparents, parents, and numerous aunts, uncles and cousins (the family tree is helpful) with the world of China’s privileged, educated elite to which they belonged ... ... This is not always a comfortable read, any more than in some places it can have been comfortable to write ... Some of the most arresting passages are about the warmth of family life: homely activities like pickling cabbages together or cooking dumplings. You can almost smell the fragrant steam, and what happens when the familiar, the commonplace, is stripped away and existence loses all logic with book burnings, head shavings, ransackings and meaningless cruelties ... It would be interesting to know what she thinks about China’s current treatment of groups like Muslim Uighurs, regarded as dissidents or potential dissidents and held in camps for 'reeducation.' Yet, as she says, she wrote less to address the present than to remember the past and find closure ... for its personal insights and universal warnings about what humans are capable of, both good and bad, Yan’s readable and touching memoir of her family deserves to be told, and she tells it well.
... expertly translated by Sam Taylor ... A touching, essential account for anyone interested in 20th-century Chinese history and highly recommended for fans of personal family memoir.
... [a] comprehensive debut memoir ... The nonlinear narrative...pivots to her family’s origin stories, sometimes confusingly so ... Yan...affectingly describes her own progression from reeducation camp in rural Henan through the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1977, to her study in Beijing and abroad, and her career in law and finance. Yan expertly captures a tumultuous period in this smart, colorful family history.
