Daughter of the River

Hong, Ying

ISBN 10: 080211637X / ISBN 13: 9780802116376

Published by Grove Pr (edition First Edition), 1999

About this Item

With dust jacket. It's a preowned item in good condition and includes all the pages. It may have some general signs of wear and tear, such as markings, highlighting, slight damage to the cover, minimal wear to the binding, etc., but they will not affect the overall reading experience.

Seller Inventory # 080211637X-11-1-29

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Daughter of the River
• Publisher: Grove Pr (edition First Edition)
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080211637X
• ISBN 13: 9780802116376
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

From her dramatic upbringing in the slums of Chongqing to her sexual and intellectual awakening to her desperate search to unravel the mystery of her birth, a dramatic coming-of-age portrait by the renowned poet and novelist details her turbulent life against the backdrop of Communist China. 25,000 first printing.

Review

Spanning the Great Famine through to the Cultural Revolution and beyond, this exceptional and totally absorbing book is not only a testament to the youth of China who took fate in their own hands by marching on Tiananmen Square in April of 1989, but is also a complex--yet at the same time somehow disturbingly simple--memoir of a young girl growing up amid a poverty and squalor that we, in our cosy homes with food on the table and light and warmth, can barely envisage.

Writing without sentimentality, and with a calm austerity that belies the passion of her youth, Hong Ying takes her reader to the very heart of her early life, growing up as she did with the stench of the slums on the banks of the Yangtze River seeping into her very soul.

Her extraordinarily ordinary life, touched by deep passion and profound darkness, steeped in history and ancient superstition, deprived of truth and trust and teetering on the brink of obscurity, makes for a severe and harrowing read that evokes images so strong and so intense that the sights,smells and sounds of Hong Ying's world seep into the mind, body and soul of the reader until they are there with her, hoping that there is more, praying that there is a way forward. But what perhaps is most disturbing about Daughter of the River is the startling realisation that what we are reading is not simply the story of one woman. It is the story of a nation, and for every child who lived through those years and found a kind of peace there are others who stood little hope of escape and are perhaps still there, fighting for the air they breathe.

Truly remarkable in every way, this beautiful, ugly, audacious, shy little book is, quite simply, one that everyone should read. --Susan Harrison