No comments about Autobiography Of A Chinese Christian.

No comments about Dilemma of the Chinese Returnee.

1 comments about Yeee-Hah: Remembrance And Longing.

1. Dr. George Shen, Chief Editor Emeritus of the Hong Kong Economic Journal, published in his column, April 11, 2005:
   "Yeee-Hah! is an impressive, enjoyable read. It is highly informative on the lives of Chinese Americans and how they coped and progressed. In particular, chapters on racial discrimination and on the comparability of the Chinese and Jews are original and written with insight. The book enables readers to have a better understanding of Americans and of the author."

No comments about Chinese Portraits (Images Across the Ages).

No comments about Geneva: The fascinating story of Geneva Sayre, missionary to the Chinese.

No comments about Reginald Johnston Chinese Mandarin: Chinese Mandarin (Scot¬s Lives).

1 comments about Market Street: A Chinese Woman in Harbin.

1. What I liked best about this autobiographical novel was translator Howard Goldblatt's introduction and description of Xiao Hong's life.
   She was born in 1911 to an abusive father who was also a ruthless landlord. He pulls her out of school at the age of 20 in order to force her into an arranged marriage. She refuses and is left on her own, not a good thing for a woman in China in the 1930s. Read Madame Mao: The White-Boned Demon by Ross Terrill. In her struggle for independence novelist Xiao Hong ends up depending on various men for support and has a child out of wedlock, which was considered scandalous back then. She dies of a respiratory infection at the age of 30 or 31 in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation.
   
   Market Street reads like a series of tenuous vignettes. Xiao Hong and her lover Langhua live in dire poverty in Harbin, a city that sometimes experiences temperatures of -50 degrees Fahrenheit. This book left a lot of unanswered questions. Xiao Hong is obviously very well-educated but mostly she stays cooped up in the apartment while Langhua goes out and desperately seeks work. At first I thought Xiao Hong was pregnant because there was some mention of a baby in the introduction. It turns out she's not pregnant she only has some minor illnesses. I know it was a tough time for women but, it seems to me that she also could have found something in the tutorial field. Langhua gets several tutoring jobs for well-to-do families: He works and gets paid like a slave.
   
   Toward the last third of this book their rice cooker is inexplicably full and they have leisure time. How they went from near starvation and freezing to death to becoming middle class is not explained. Langhua begins writing plays but it's not all that lucrative. Then rumors start flying that they are on the hit list of the Japanese occupiers. The reader is never really informed as to the reason for this. There are vague hints that some of the plays could be considered anti-Japanese. I realize that it was WWII in an enemy occupied country and there doesn't really have to be a reason. What's so incongruous is that in spite of their fear for their lives they don't immediately flee Harbin for one of the unoccupied areas. Instead they set a time table to leave for Shanghai in several months. They need time to have the equivalent of a yard sale and say goodbye to all of their friends. Does this sound like people running for their lives?

No comments about In Memory of Fei-Ping Hsu - A World Classic Pianist (in Chinese).

No comments about The Chinese Connection.

No comments about Biography of Su Ch'o [Chou shu, chüan 23] (Institute of East Asiatic Studies, University of California. Chinese dynastic histories translations).