Customer Reviews

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

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"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.

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.