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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
reflective
medium-paced
the ending confused me but i liked the book best summer reading book so far
challenging
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
His version of the story may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs. The hearer can carry it tucked away without it taking up much room. Long ago in China, knot-makers tied strings into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.
Maybe that's my mother cut my tongue. She pushed my tongue up and sliced the frenum. Or maybe she snipped it with a pair of nail scissors. I don't remember her doing it, only her telling me about it, but all during childhood I felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife in hand for it to cry - and then, when its mouth was wide open like a baby bird's, cut. The Chinese say "a ready tongue is an evil."
I used to curl up my tongue in front of the mirror and tauten my frenum into a white line, itself asthin as a razor blade. I saw no scars in my mouth. I thought perhaps I had had two frena, and she had cut one. I made other children open their mouths so I could compare theirs to mine. I saw perfect pink membranes stretching into precise edges that looked easy enough to cut. Sometimes I felt very proud that my mother committed such a powerful act upon me. At other time I was terrified - the first thing my mother did when she saw me was to cut my tongue.
The depth of this grew on me with every story. I hate memoirs, which this claims to be, but it's also far more literary than that. It's not the truth, at least not all of it. Kingston weaves lies, contradictions, corrections, complications, reinterpretations, all of it together as she tells her stories about being Chinese-American. She opens the book with "You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you" from her mother and proceeds to expose it all. She weaves Chinese folk tales with family "talk-story" as she calls it. Her mother says later that Chinese always say the opposite of what they mean. It's all meant to explore what story's role is in forming identity, understanding your family, and particularly in these ambiguous spaces where nothing is straightforward. Both Chinese and American. Both daughter and mother. Both immigrant and native (Kingston is born in California, but so deeply ingrained in Chinese immigrant communities, the experience feels blurred). It's a beautiful, albeit at times brutal book.
This was the final book I read for an American Literature class and while it has a ton of interesting ideas I just could not get very invested in the book itself. The stories are pretty disjointed and I just wasn't a fan of the style.
it's hard reading something that's supposed to be THE book on asian-american feminism and not finding it particularly relatable or insightful, but that's also partly the point.
I don't know how to review this book because it is so unlike anything else I have read. Calling it "non-fiction" feels inaccurate because so much of it is daydream and fantasy. I can see why this became a feminist classic in the 1970s, and it still feels wrenchingly honest... but also dated.
Couldn’t get into it. I was forcing myself to read it because it was a recommendation but I didn’t get it. Also don’t like historical books.
Gorgeous, unusual, hybrid genre. (Thank god, we should continue to move in the direction of abandoning fiction/nonfiction/poetry labels!) Truly lovely and weird passages. Certainly one I'll return to.
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2022 #8: Read a classic written by a POC.
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced