Daughter of the River [Hardcover]

Ying Hong (Author), Howard Goldblatt (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1999

With searing lyricism, "Daughter of the River" portrays the coming-of-age of a young writer in the urban slums of Communist China.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The daughter is Hong Ying, a Chinese poet and novelist whose Summer of Betrayal (1997) was banned in the People's Republic, published in Taiwan and translated into English and published in the U.S. by FSG. The river is the Yangtze, whose steady presence comforted Hong during her childhood in a Chongqing slum, despite her inability to swim and her terror of the ferry crossing to the city center. In this memoir, she expresses a similar ambivalence toward her family, whose cold treatment left her resentful and hungry for love. In the days leading up to her 18th birthday, Hong's growing need to understand why she was an outsider in her own family was counterbalanced by a budding affair with her history teacher. Against a backdrop of abject poverty (her family of eight lived in two tiny rooms), political oppression (the teacher was targeted by the Communist Party) and starvation (Hong was born in 1962, during the Great Famine), the mystery of Hong's birth comes to light through childhood memories, the stories of her parents and the discovery of the identity of the stalker who regularly followed her home from school. After learning that she was the result of an adulterous relationship, Hong suffered a painful evening with her biological father, cruel accusations from her siblings and the abrupt end of her affair with the teacher. "I suffered from escapism, the disease of weaklings," Hong writes in explaining how and why she left home. She's too hard on herself. This memoir is an astonishing picture of inner fortitude marshaled against insult and injury amid the turmoil and repression?both political and emotional?of mid-century China.
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From The New Yorker

...explores the depths of personal and civil repression with an almost brutal grace.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 278 pages
• Publisher: Grove Pr (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080211637X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116376
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,694,072 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars refreshing change, January 18, 2000

By 

michael (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Daughter of the River: An Autobiography (Paperback)

Hong Ying presents a raw, unpolished notation of her life in the slums of China. It is a look at the other side of Chinese society, as compared with Falling Leaves, Adeline Yen Mah. Hong's style is strong and captivating in it's own, almost amateurish way. Daughter of the river, is highly recommended for anyone interested in Chinese society and life, without a strongly political slant, which seems to pervade so many other Chinese autobiographies, Three Swans, for instance. All in all, a good read.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How do you fit so much pain into beautiful words?, January 23, 2000

By 

Ryan Brenner (Texas, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Daughter of the River (Hardcover)

It is true that this autobiography is bleak. It is dark, but it is a reflection of the poverty and oppression experienced by the peasant class in China, now and all during the rule of the Communist regime. How Hong Ying is able to evoke absolute beauty from this seemingly unending ugliness is beyond me. But she expertly does just that. Without thought or pretense, Hong Ying's writing sings immaculately from the page. Amazing prose. This book's importance lies in that it is the story of someone from the peasant class, and since it is always good to hear all different perspectives of the same or similar events in order to get a good all around picture of the times, Hong Ying's book is a must read. In commenting on the book to a friend, I said that perhaps Hong Ying and her family's saving grace was that they were already at the bottom of the totem pole. Because of this they didn't have to experience the worst of what the Cultural Revolution had to offer eventhough it touched their lives daily. The peasant class of China is what Mao Zedong strived to make all the people of China in the name of proletarianism. The fact that Hong Ying and her family were already of this class meant that many of the dynamics of the time that were sweeping through all classes above them settled into their class as normalcy somewhat. It's like a line from Joan Chen's movie "Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl;" at one point when Xiu Xiu is questioning where she is being sent, she is told that it doesn't matter because it's the same everywhere; a simple statement but poignant in just how dead on right it is. Therefore, you must appreciate even moreso when we are allowed to read of these events by all those who were a part of them be it peasant or merchant. If it's done well, it is the most captivating of things to read because it means they made it out and are able to share it with us now. Before, any scraps of paper containing this type of writing would have been confiscated and burned, a black mark put in your file, or perhaps you'd be arrested. Hong Ying has done a brilliant job telling of her coming into womanhood in those times and of the exuberant curiosity she had about her family and herself, always having been treated as the outsider.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Letter to the Author: .. Touches my heart deeply.., June 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Daughter of the River (Hardcover)

Dear Hong Ying

Thank you so much for sending me your book. I was totally gripped by your narrative and when I finished it I found myself weeping uncontrollably. There is so much in your story which strikes my raw emotion and which touches my heart deeply.This is not just because I feel instinctively tuned into the underworld you depicted so vividly due to similar experiences in my life in Chongqing. More importantly, it embodies almost exactly the literary project which has long been fermenting in my mind. I have always longed to read something or even write something which could show that big words such as freedom, democracy and human rights are not just some high-sounding principles; that they affect millions of ordinary people's lives in many concrete ways.

In my discipline of political science, the rise of East Asia in the 1980s spawned a huge industry of academic research on the relathionship between political system and economic development. For quite a while, Western scholars who were critical of their own democratic system joined the chorus of East Asian dictators such as Suharto, Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Mahathir (of Malaysia) to defend the "necessity" of authoritarianism for the sake of economic development and political stability. I think your book would be an ideal antidote to this typical "arm-chair" scholarship devoid of any sense of reality. To me, your book serves as a powerful warning that development without democracy simply

creates another privileged class standing above the law and everyone else. I am often angered and depressed by the world I live in. It seems to me so many human injustices stem ultimately from the fact that too many human beings are greedy and cruel.