Tracing It Home: A Chinese Journey (Kodansha globe series) [Hardcover]

Lynn Pan (Author)

Book Description

Series: Kodansha globe series | Publication Date: September 1993

International in scope, this series of non-fiction trade paperbacks offers books that explore the lives, customs and thoughts of peoples and cultures around the world. This is the story of a Chinese family's journey from Shanghai.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In piecing together her family's history, Pan (author of five other books on China) provides here much-needed knowledge about Chinese social conditions between 1930 and 1980. She describes prerevolutionary Shanghai as a city in which people had the "freedom to press pleasure to excess." Her grandmother committed suicide to escape the misery caused by the knowledge of her husband's infidelity; her grandfather and paternal aunt eventually were destroyed by their opium addiction. With the dawning of the Communist era, every attempt was made to squeeze out potential dissent with mass executions and imprisonment. While Pan points out that her version of conditions in China is a mixture of probable truths, mostly from a family retainer who was imprisoned by the Communists for 24 years, and distorted family memories, two important themes emerge. First, Chinese people define the past as part of their present and, second, "fate" is a significant force even for the most rational and adaptable of individuals. Highly recommended.
- Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Oak Park, Ill.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Splendid, multifaceted recounting of the Shanghai-born author's search for her roots. Pan (Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 1990) combines history, social anthropology, and biography into a savory stir-fry that leaves us hungering for more. The death of Pan's father provided impetus for the author's search. So Chinese was their relationship that Pan could never ask him the myriad questions she had concerning their family--even though the two, isolated in a remote Canadian cabin, shared much of what was to be her father's last winter. Returning to Shanghai after his death, Pan rediscovered the long-lost family retainer, Hanze--who retained his nearly photographic memory despite having suffered 24 years in China's labor camps. As she made several trips to visit cemeteries, former family homes, buildings, and long-lost relatives, the years fell away for Pan, revealing family secrets, correcting misconceptions. Her grandfather was not a stevedore but a common coolie who became a labor contractor, then a very successful building contractor. Pan's parents, socialites of 30's and 40's Shanghai, resided in mansions, rode about in a long, gleaming Packard--he in a serge suit, she in furs--and danced to Harry James and Benny Goodman. Philandering came with the culture: wealth begot mistresses. Having married for love, Pan's unhappy grandmother committed suicide and was replaced by a mistress, ``Madame,'' who ruled with an iron fist and usurped her stepson's inheritance. Then the Communists confiscated all, branding Grandfather a traitor and leaving Madame to die an impoverished alcoholic. Later on, history repeated itself and Pan's brother lost much of his birthright to his own father's mistress. Pan explores all of this thoroughly, even trekking beyond the Gobi Desert to see where Hanze was enslaved. The finest sort of historical and social writing: living, unpretentious, and moving, but with no recrimination or garment- rending. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc; First Edition edition (September 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568360096
• ISBN-13: 978-1568360096
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,520,772 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An intelligent alternative to the likes of Amy Tan, May 16, 2002

By 

Elisabeth W. Movius (Shanghai China) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tracing It Home: A Chinese Journey (Kodansha globe series) (Hardcover)

"Tracing it Home" could be criticized for the many things it is not, but for what it IS, it is wonderful. Lynn Pan is one of the best, if not THE best writer around on subjects of Old Shanghai and the Chinese Diaspora. She is a Writer, however, and not a historian or a journalist. She tells a story, and tells it engagingly and beautifully.

"Tracing it Home" is a vastly superior alternative to the sloppy, melodramatic and orientalized literature from other Overseas Chinese women writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. Their works, yes, appeal to western readers, but only because they present the stylized characature of Chinese history and culture that western readers imagine, rather than the complicated reality. That is because these Chinese Americans know China only through the lens of immigrant idealized mythology and American misperceptions, rather than their own experience.

Lynn is a world different from those poseurs, because she knows and understands China, as it was and as it is. She gives context to the historical cruelties that most ABC writers eroticize. She grew up in Malaysia's dynamic Chinese population and in England and Hong Kong, but was born in and now lives in Shanghai.

The story of the Pan family is fascinating and elegantly presented. Lynn's builder grandfather was the Horatio Alger type that made Shanghai famous. The travails his success created for his offspring are remarkable yet common among Shanghai families. Lynn Pan knows this, and avoids the wallowing in self-importance that makes most "I survived China" memoirs tedius (ie "Red Azalea", "Life and Death in Shanghai").

Lynn is an elegant, evocative writer, and perhaps the greatest pleasure of "Tracing it Home" is its purveyance of Shanghai as a place, and her grandfather's large role in shaping the city's geography. The post-modern white box of a 1940s mansion that he built and where Lynn was born is just down the block from my current home, and I can see the Picardie, which he built, out my window. Small pleasures, slices of personal history, are contained in this big little story.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful book, June 22, 2005

By 

Laura Brown (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tracing It Home: A Chinese Journey (Kodansha globe series) (Hardcover)

Lynn Pan's "Tracing It Home" is a resonant and beautiful memoir that stayed with me long after I finished reading it. She has a particular gift for intertwining family issues with historical ones, leading to a very rich narrative. As I look over the book, I see many, many pages I have turned down so that I can revisit a particularly poignant turn of phrase. If you are interested in the history of Shanghai or in Chinese family relationships, you will learn a great deal from this book and experience a very enjoyable read in the process.