Customer Reviews

China Dawn

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I loved this book so much so that I've looked for additional books by this author. I gave this book to my mother who also loved it and she can't wait to give it to her friends. We may be prejudiced though as we lived in Southeast Asia in the 50s and 60s so this hits home for us. I also gave the Queen's Messenger to my daughter's boyfriend who is a journalism major. He really didn't think he would like it since he's more sports and non-fiction minded but he couldn't put the book down either.

I love China Dawn so much that I translated it into Chinese. Zhongguo Fuxiao, the Chinese version, was published on January 1, 2009 by World Affairs Press in Beijing. I was able to reach the daughter of the author, the late Robert L. Duncan, for the project. She was thrilled about it.

China Dawn is the story of an American diplomat, Sam Cummings, who first arrived in Shanghai, China in the early 1930s, and two other main characters, Yuki, a young Japanese woman who escaped poverty at home to start a life in China and Ito, a Japanese military diplomat serving in China. The book follows their work, love, struggle, loss, separation and reunion through the war and the post-war years, all the way to the 1980s. Out of their relationships, a little girl was born in wartime Shanghai and was named Dawn.

More importantly, China Dawn is also a story of evolvement of the American foreign policy towards China, especially during the Japanese invasion and occupation of China, from neutrality to allying with and fighting along China. It tells, a first to me, through the experience of an American, Sam, part of the Nanjing Massacre the Japanese military committed against the Chinese population in the winter of 1937, a crime known to all Chinese but not many Americans.

Finally, China Dawn is a love story, a love spanning countries and nationalities, war and peace, American, Chinese and Japanese, and a love for China.

I most strongly and passionately recommend China Dawn, which I discovered by accident. Read it in English or Chinese. Maybe someone should also translate it into Japanese.

"China Dawn" is a novel that can't decide what story it wants to tell. The author beings with a story set in the present day, then explains the background from before World War 2 where it began, only to have a very predictable ending in the present.

The author spent about 300 pages with details that were extraordinarily unnecessary. He introduced several characters that have nothing to do with the outcome of the final story and left me scratching my head.

The final complaint about this novel I have is the author should avoid using Japanese phrases. He used so many phrases incorrectly that it was almost laughable. It's clear he's learned about 10 words in Japanese, it would just have been nice if he used them correctly.

I give it two stars for its depiction of pre-World War II Shanghai, but beyond that, the author tortured me with about 250-300 pages of detail that, however interesting, were irrelevant.