Chinese American Women
Red China Blues : My Long March from Mao to Now by Jan Wong. Paperback 368 pages Reprint edition (June 1997) Anchor. "A crackerjack journalist's (she's a George Polk Award winner) immensely entertaining and enlightening account of what she learned during several extended sojourns in the People's Republic of China. A second-generation Canadian who enjoyed a sheltered, even privileged, childhood in Montreal, Wong nonetheless developed a youthful crush on Mao Zedong's brand of Communism. " "(Wong) recounts her sojourn in Communist China beginning in 1972, during which her strong faith in Maoist ideology gave way to sympathy with the dissident movement that began under Deng Xiaoping. "
Bound Feet & Western Dress by Pang-Mei Natasha Chang. Paperback - 215 pages Reprint edition (October 1997) Anchor Books. "When Chang Yu-I was three her mother tried to bind her feet. But the child's cries so tormented her brother that he convinced their mother to stop. This break with convention foreshadowed the extraordinary life Yu-i was to lead. After following her husband, poet Hsu Chi-Mo, a noted philanderer, to Oxford, she made history by becoming the first Chinese woman to have a western-style divorce at age 22. Determined to make her own way, she moved to America and served in a series of prestigious positions, including president of a bank. Written by Yu-i's great niece, Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, Bound Feet and Western Dress chronicles the life of this exceptional woman. "
Falling Leaves : The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah. Paperback- 278 pages Reprint edition (April 6, 1999) Broadway Books. Also available in hardcover."The author's memoir of life in mainland China and--after the 1949 revolution--Hong Kong is a gruesome chronicle of nonstop emotional abuse from her wealthy father and his beautiful, cruel second wife. Chinese proverbs scattered throughout the text pithily covey the traditional world view that prompted Adeline's subservience. Had she not escaped to America, where she experienced a fulfilling medical career and a happy marriage, her story would be unbearable; instead, it's grimly fascinating. "
On Gold Mountain : The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family by Lisa See. Paperback - 394 pages (September 1996) Vintage Books. "Out of the stories heard in her childhood in Los Angeles's Chinatown and years of research, See has constructed this sweeping chronicle of her Chinese-American family, a work that takes in stories of racism and romance, entrepreneurial genius and domestic heartache, secret marriages and sibling rivalries, in a powerful history of two cultures meeting in a new world. 82 photos. "
Paper Daughter : A Memoir by M. Elaine Mar. PHardcover - 292 pages (August 1999) Harperflamingo." Born in Hong Kong to parents who immigrated there from the Toishan region of mainland China, Elaine Mar came to America in 1972, when she was not quite 6. Colorado was quite a shock to a girl who had previously shared a five-room apartment with four other families. "She must be rich," Man Yee (her Chinese name) thought, emerging from the basement room where she and her parents slept to explore her Aunt Becky's three-bedroom house in a working-class Denver neighborhood. Not so: her aunt, father, and other relatives worked in the kitchen of a restaurant owned by others, and Mar's pungent memoir of her odyssey from poor immigrant to Harvard undergraduate shatters stereotypes about Asians as the "model minority." She was a smart girl and a good student who soon preferred the American name Elaine and "only spoke Chinese when absolutely necessary," but she found it hard to decipher the "cultural cues" on which social success in school depended. Honestly chronicling conflicts with her parents, whose horizons and expectations seemed unbearably limited, Mar outlines her youthful rebellion and their response with mature understanding. Her observation of American life is as clear-eyed and unsentimental as her self-portrait of a girl adrift between two cultures. --Wendy Smith "
Beyond the Narrow Gate : The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America by Leslie Chang. Hardcover - 288 pages (May 1999)
E P Dutton. "The Chinese this century have endured traumas inconceivable to modern Western generations. Beyond the Narrow Gate is the story of four girls who fled extreme violence, privation, and the Communist Red Army in 1948. Author Leslie Chang hoped to uncover the family history that her mother, one of the girls, was unwilling to talk about and learn her own identity in the process. The gulf between their experiences is profound. As Chang says of her orphaned mother, "At thirteen, she had learned to expect only the worst from life; at thirteen, I thought the greatest tragedy was losing a contact lens." Chang's tale weaves together several themes: her mother's passage from Chinese student to American housewife; the varied experiences of three friends her mother made at an elite girls' school in Taiwan; the mother-daughter relationship; and growing up in an alien culture."
Spider Eaters : A Memoir by Rae Yang. Paperback - 312 pages Reprint edition (November 1998) University of California Press. "Born in 1950, Rae Yang came of age in a time of tremendous social upheaval in her native China. Her parents, Communist intellectuals who had been in favor with the leadership, were denounced during the so-called anti-Rightist campaigns of the 1950s. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Yang, a Red Guard, traveled throughout the country spreading revolutionary fever--an exciting period, she recalls, that she had much time to reflect on while later working at a collectivized pig farm. (She named the pigs under her charge, she writes: Capitalist, Prince, Natasha, and so on.) Disillusioned by the violence, repression, and hardship all around her, Yang eventually managed to leave China on a student visa for the United States. "Lies, big and small, cannot easily hypnotize me," she writes, and her memoir paints an honest portrait of a China in suffering."
Surviving on the Gold Mountain : A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives by Huping Ling. Paperback - 256 pages (September 1998)
State Univ of New York Press. Also in hardcover.
Unbound Feet : A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco by Judy Yung. Paperback - 395 pages (November 1995) Univ California Press. "The crippling custom of footbinding is the thematic touchstone for Judy Yung's engrossing study of Chinese American women during the first half of the twentieth century. Using this symbol of subjugation to examine social change in the lives of these women, she shows the stages of "unbinding" that occurred in the decades between the turn of the century and the end of World War II. The setting for this captivating history is San Francisco, which had the largest Chinese population in the United States. Yung, a second-generation Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco, uses an impressive range of sources to tell her story. Oral history interviews, previously unknown autobiographies, both English- and Chinese-language newspapers, government census records, and exceptional photographs from public archives and private collections combine to make this a richly human document as well as an illuminating treatise on race, gender, and class dynamics. While presenting larger social trends Yung highlights the many individual experiences of Chinese American women, and her skill as an oral history interviewer gives this work an immediacy that is poignant and effective. Her analysis of intraethnic class riftsa major gap in ethnic historysheds important light on the difficulties that Chinese American women faced in their own communities. Yung provides a more accurate view of their lives than has existed before, revealing the many ways that these womenrather than being passive victims of oppressionwere active agents in the making of their own history. "
Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco by Judy Yung. Paperback - 500 pages (December 1999) Univ California Press. "Unbound Voices brings together the voices of Chinese American women in a fascinating, intimate collection of documents--letters, essays, poems, autobiographies, speeches, testimonials, and oral histories--detailing half a century of their lives in America. Together, these sources provide a captivating mosaic of Chinese women's experiences in their own words, as they tell of making a home for themselves and their families in San Francisco from the Gold Rush years through World War II. "
Chinese Women of America : A Pictorial History by Judy Yung. University of Washington Press. Out of print.
