A review by sophronisba
I Am China by Xiaolu Guo

3.0

I Am China is an ambitious book about an important topic. But it never really came together for me. Xiaolu Guo has so many ideas that they never really coalesce. She wants to talk about identity, and politics, and revolution, and language, and isolation, and love, and sex, and human connection. In the end, I felt she was only partly successful. I would rather read a novel that successfully tackles one or two of these ideas than one at which the author seems to have thrown every thought she’s ever had in hopes something will stick. That’s maybe a bit harsher than it should be; I do think that Guo says some interesting things about the human cost of political resistance. (And I found it particularly interesting since I’d just finished Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which gave me a different perspective on life in post-Tiananmen China.) I just felt that the novel could have been more powerful if Guo had brought more focus to it.