Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.06 AVERAGE
4.06 AVERAGE
Li Cunxin writes in a style I really appreciated - facts are stated, but not overly dwelt upon. Despite the serious challenges (which are clearly shared), this is a fairly uplifting book.
Glad to have finally read this one. But I don't think it has earned a permanent place on my bookshelf.
Glad to have finally read this one. But I don't think it has earned a permanent place on my bookshelf.
Enjoyed this more than WIld swans which I read around the same time. Incredible how much he practised, inspiring story
Not a huge fan of the memoir when you know everything from the back cover. But this one had a fascinating look at China and the conditions some there live in. Sad to think this happened in my lifetime and likely continues today. Good book club discussion afterwards too.
Every now and then I enjoy an autobiography and this is my favorite!
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
The memoir is beautifully told and gives really stunning insight into the culture Li Cunxin grew up in. I had a really hard time with the pacing but I did really like the book.
2.5/5
I remember the days of having to do little more than what I was told, a portion of which involved my participation in an intensive sport that I had no control over the choosing of. The sport infrastructure and pedagogical guidance were certainly better equipped, less confusing, and more mindful of my physical limits than were Li's, but I can't say that my awareness of the international scope of the WASP capitalism that I subconsciously imbibed day in and day out was any better than his was regarding Chinese communism. If I had been pulled out of school, rigorously boxed into my respective sport, chosen for an international delegation, and then flown off to China, much as how Li did not see a single percent of the true landscape of the United States, I would not have toured the regions that he was born and bred in in full exposure to the political reality of his nation. Put Li of the '70s and '80s in a the region of, say, Oakland in California, or Detroit in Michigan, or any of the countries that 'disaster capitalism' had designated as feeding grounds for the blessed denizens of the country he chose to defect to out of personal principle (and no small amount of hedonism), and he would have seen a truer representation of Houston in Texas, if one too complicated for him to grasp at the time. I'm not faulting Li for writing what he knew, but I do hope he realized at some point how much his success is due to how useful a political pawn he was for a country that, a year after he defected, all but pardoned the highly publicized white supremacist murder of Vincent Chin. At the very least, I would hope the readers of this work would acknowledge such, but I don't have much faith in the 'reading for pleasure' crowd when it comes to that kind of critical legwork.
It doesn't surprise me that not only is there a young reader's version of this work, it only cuts out around a hundred pages or so of the original material. Other than the references to sex and gun violence, all of this reads not that differently from your standard small European child bildungsroman, albeit with some cultural differences and the lack of such things such as boarding schools and tea time. I imagine they cut out the references of the antiblack violence specific to the US as well, which if left in would have just been too much for the coddled little white kid that that kind of edition is always largely aimed towards. In any case, this was over and done, and it was admittedly nice to have something that wasn't too intensive when reading about disaster capitalism and Nazi philosophy and some truly nasty neoliberal fantasies became too much. Such is the price one pays when one has my kind of reading appetite during Nonfiction November, so my following this work with the next volume in a series of fiction that I have on a yearly schedule will likely prove a needed respite. All in all, this is a work that has its strengths and its weaknesses. I just wouldn't recommend it to anyone old enough to drink.
America! I heard everyone there carries guns. If they don't like you they'll just shoot you.There was a time when I believed reading autobiographies/memoirs/nonfiction (however 'non' it actually ended up being) of that sort would get me closer to the 'truth,' whatever that was. These days, I know that anywhere between 75%-95% of the works of that sort put out these days are written by those who don't attempt to accurately contextualize themselves in the bigger picture. That alone would be normal, but throw in how well the US publication industry works as status quo propaganda the less white and/or domestic the writer is, and you have the reason why I've been less than impressed by my reading of the autobiographies and co. that I amassed in the last decade or so. This one had its moments of insight, pathos, and even charm, but much as Li was likely only helped as much as he was due to how useful a figure he would be to the US and co. media machine during the latter days of the Red Scare, having this work published in the 21st c. with absolutely no mention of Tiananmen Square allows Neo-Euro publishers to put forth a careful mix of othering and the kind of tact that generates billions for 'Western' companies invested in building the Great Wall of Censorship. So, clearly a work that would have benefitted had I read it all the way back in 2012, but how much would have such a reading benefitted me? Enough to outweigh the unpacking I would have had to do for the next eight years? I have my doubts.
I remember the days of having to do little more than what I was told, a portion of which involved my participation in an intensive sport that I had no control over the choosing of. The sport infrastructure and pedagogical guidance were certainly better equipped, less confusing, and more mindful of my physical limits than were Li's, but I can't say that my awareness of the international scope of the WASP capitalism that I subconsciously imbibed day in and day out was any better than his was regarding Chinese communism. If I had been pulled out of school, rigorously boxed into my respective sport, chosen for an international delegation, and then flown off to China, much as how Li did not see a single percent of the true landscape of the United States, I would not have toured the regions that he was born and bred in in full exposure to the political reality of his nation. Put Li of the '70s and '80s in a the region of, say, Oakland in California, or Detroit in Michigan, or any of the countries that 'disaster capitalism' had designated as feeding grounds for the blessed denizens of the country he chose to defect to out of personal principle (and no small amount of hedonism), and he would have seen a truer representation of Houston in Texas, if one too complicated for him to grasp at the time. I'm not faulting Li for writing what he knew, but I do hope he realized at some point how much his success is due to how useful a political pawn he was for a country that, a year after he defected, all but pardoned the highly publicized white supremacist murder of Vincent Chin. At the very least, I would hope the readers of this work would acknowledge such, but I don't have much faith in the 'reading for pleasure' crowd when it comes to that kind of critical legwork.
It doesn't surprise me that not only is there a young reader's version of this work, it only cuts out around a hundred pages or so of the original material. Other than the references to sex and gun violence, all of this reads not that differently from your standard small European child bildungsroman, albeit with some cultural differences and the lack of such things such as boarding schools and tea time. I imagine they cut out the references of the antiblack violence specific to the US as well, which if left in would have just been too much for the coddled little white kid that that kind of edition is always largely aimed towards. In any case, this was over and done, and it was admittedly nice to have something that wasn't too intensive when reading about disaster capitalism and Nazi philosophy and some truly nasty neoliberal fantasies became too much. Such is the price one pays when one has my kind of reading appetite during Nonfiction November, so my following this work with the next volume in a series of fiction that I have on a yearly schedule will likely prove a needed respite. All in all, this is a work that has its strengths and its weaknesses. I just wouldn't recommend it to anyone old enough to drink.
Those normal European countries (with their strong social safety nets, workers' protections, powerful trade unions and socialized health care) emerged as a compromise between Communism and capitalism. Now that there was no need for compromise, all those moderating social policies were under siege in Western Europe, just as they were under siege in Canada, Australia and the U.S.
-Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
challenging
informative
sad
slow-paced
slow-paced