Customer Reviews

At Middle Age

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Lu Wenting is a middle age mother of two children, married to an engineer, and they all live in one room, in an apartment building located near the large hospital in a large northern city in China where Shen Rong has been an ophthalmologist for seventeen years. Although Shen Rong's exposition of Lu's medical training and the functioning of the Chinese communist system at the grass root's level is fascinating, the heart and soul of the story is the telling of Lu's personal story. Lu made sacrifices during her early life, foregoing romance and entertainment, so that she could become a doctor, not for prestige or money, but to help her country and her fellow countrymen. Shen Rong has developed this premise, which in the hands of a lesser writer would become a soap opera, with care, skill and manifested love for humanity. Lu and her husband both endure a hard life:confined living space, little money, a suffocating bureaucracy, which daily intrudes into their professional lives, long hours, and no help with the children. What Rong develops is a love story about two people who are struggling to survive, but never neglect each other, and are more concerned with their lovers welfare then their own. Lu's purity, strength, authenticity, and love transform and uplift the bureaucracy, and Shen Rong transforms and uplifts the reader.I intend to read this wonderful story many times.