A sensitively written portrayal of a Chinese American family with many secrets and a serious failure to communicate. Ling Tang has been widowed for nearly a year, but can’t get past the pain of a brittle marriage and two adult children who can’t communicate with her, each other, or their significant others. The story is told from the varying perspectives of Ling and her children Emily and Michael, and the rawness of their damaged lives is tangible and sometimes hard to take, but she offers […]
A Story About Chinese Americans (No Concubines!)
The Year She Left Us is a first-rate novel from a first-time novelist. Using the western adoption of Chinese girls as a plot device, it examines issues of abandonment, adoption and assimilation; the relationships among mothers, daughters, and sisters; and, like Mary Karr’s memoir, the impact of “lies of omission” on a family. The Year She Left Us is the story of Ari, her mother Charlie, her aunt Les and her Gran — the Kong women. Gran was born and raised in China, coming to […]
Pretty much everything I know about the Boxer Rebellion, I learned from these books
In Boxers, we see the origins of the Chinese Boxer rebellion through the eyes of Bao, who becomes one of its leaders. Bao grows up in rural China at the end of the 19th Century. He lives for the spring every year when travelling troups perform operas, full of drama, excitement and ancient stories of heroes and gods. The stories stay with him throughout the rest of the year when he performs his chores and is teased by his older brothers. His life changes irrevocably the day one […]
A trip down the Yangtze …. with a corpse!
The final volume of the “Red Princess” trilogy, Dragon Bones had me captured from the get-go. The author introduces us to the mighty Yangtze River in China by portraying the voyage of a corpse as it is swept, crashing and smashing and sometimes floating its way through the Three Gorges and the massive dam of that name still under construction, until fetching up on the outskirts of a city, setting the stage for an investigation by our intrepid couple Detective Liu Hulan and her […]
A Thrilling Mystery Amid U.S.-China Relations
This second in the “Red Princess” trilogy is an exciting and well-plotted mystery wrapped around a continued powerful in-depth look at modern China’s political, economic and social contradictions. The story begins in the impoverished Chinese countryside which was for a while the touted model of the Cultural Revolution, until it was once again abandoned to its fate and to the cruel exploitation of foreign investors and local opportunists. Then we are back in Beijing, where our heroine Detective Liu Hulan is called upon to investigate […]
Chinese/U.S. Relations Viewed Through the Lens of a Murder Mystery
Flower Net is the first of a trilogy by this author, whose Snow Flower and the Secret Fan blew me away when I read it several years ago. This book travels back and forth between the U.S. and China in 1997, and is an incisive political commentary couched in a splendid if somewhat gruesome murder mystery. Liu Hulan is a beautiful young Chinese detective who has had to fight hard to achieve her respected status, but has to contend with the fact that is a […]
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