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A review by sjgrodsky
Nine Continents: A Memoir in and Out of China by Xiaolu Guo
5.0
I didn’t spend a full month on this book. Two other books got interspersed with this one. Once I settled down, I tore through it in four days or so.
I still cannot conceive of the utter brutality the author suffered. Abandoned, starved, neglected, beaten, raped, all before her teens. My, if this is what the Chinese call “civilization”, we will have to agree to disagree on the meaning of the word.
One reviewer described it as a Bildungsroman (the maturing of a creative personality). It is that, but “Life with PTSD” seems more germane. This is a person who was deeply traumatized when an infant. She seems cold, unloving, even ungrateful. But her first months of life misshaped her, making it impossible for her to feel the emotions most people feel. Asking her to express love or gratitude or admiration or affection is like asking a color-blind person to pick out the magenta ball from the bowl.
Most strange is that she has not a word of affection for her father. You can see that her father recognizes his girl as a creative personality like himself. He takes her to Beijing to sit for the film school admission exam. When she fails, he buys her the books she needs, supports her for a year as she studies, and takes her to Beijing a second time, when she is admitted. Isn’t that love? Doesn’t that demand recognition? Not from Xiaolu.
And yet you feel that Xiaolu does connect with her father as artist-to-artist. She takes him to the city in France where Van Gogh lived and painted, knowing that her father, a painter himself, would want to see the scenes that had inspired a painter he so admired.
She never forgives her mother or brother. Nor does she make any attempt to understand why they did what they did. It’s PTSD. She was so deeply brutalized as such a young age that she cannot overcome.
She is remarkably disinterested in connecting with her peers. For example: she shares the same tiny dorm room with three other girls. We do learn quite a bit about one, Mengmeng, who confronts Xiaolu’s rapist before attempting suicide. Xiaolu’s other roommates never even get named.
The most interesting parts, for me, were the paragraphs she devotes to her struggles with the English language.
-Chinese does not have verb tenses, and she never quite gets why we think they are necessary.
-Chinese uses ideograms — pictures — to express ideas, and the purely phonetic writing style of English lacks subtlety and nuance.
The attitude she expresses in these criticisms is typical of her attitude towards life: “This is hard. Why does it have to be so hard? Why are you being mean to me? Why isn’t life more beautiful?”
I still cannot conceive of the utter brutality the author suffered. Abandoned, starved, neglected, beaten, raped, all before her teens. My, if this is what the Chinese call “civilization”, we will have to agree to disagree on the meaning of the word.
One reviewer described it as a Bildungsroman (the maturing of a creative personality). It is that, but “Life with PTSD” seems more germane. This is a person who was deeply traumatized when an infant. She seems cold, unloving, even ungrateful. But her first months of life misshaped her, making it impossible for her to feel the emotions most people feel. Asking her to express love or gratitude or admiration or affection is like asking a color-blind person to pick out the magenta ball from the bowl.
Most strange is that she has not a word of affection for her father. You can see that her father recognizes his girl as a creative personality like himself. He takes her to Beijing to sit for the film school admission exam. When she fails, he buys her the books she needs, supports her for a year as she studies, and takes her to Beijing a second time, when she is admitted. Isn’t that love? Doesn’t that demand recognition? Not from Xiaolu.
And yet you feel that Xiaolu does connect with her father as artist-to-artist. She takes him to the city in France where Van Gogh lived and painted, knowing that her father, a painter himself, would want to see the scenes that had inspired a painter he so admired.
She never forgives her mother or brother. Nor does she make any attempt to understand why they did what they did. It’s PTSD. She was so deeply brutalized as such a young age that she cannot overcome.
She is remarkably disinterested in connecting with her peers. For example: she shares the same tiny dorm room with three other girls. We do learn quite a bit about one, Mengmeng, who confronts Xiaolu’s rapist before attempting suicide. Xiaolu’s other roommates never even get named.
The most interesting parts, for me, were the paragraphs she devotes to her struggles with the English language.
-Chinese does not have verb tenses, and she never quite gets why we think they are necessary.
-Chinese uses ideograms — pictures — to express ideas, and the purely phonetic writing style of English lacks subtlety and nuance.
The attitude she expresses in these criticisms is typical of her attitude towards life: “This is hard. Why does it have to be so hard? Why are you being mean to me? Why isn’t life more beautiful?”