I think they aren’t looked at in a positive light in literature enough, and Compestine presents it in such a beautiful, realistic manner. The other element, and what is the core of the story, is that this is really a story about a father/daughter relationship, and I have a serious soft spot for those. People should be able to do the things they enjoy, yet adults make everything so painful and complicated.
It really should be that simple, the way a child sees it. At one point she says she doesn’t understand why she shouldn’t wear flowered dresses if she likes them. Through the eyes of a child who doesn’t understand politics, it just all looks so silly. One is that it takes a completely unglamorized look at what any massive political change looks like to a child. Once I got past the narration style, I really appreciated two elements of this story. That’s such an excellent story in and of itself I don’t see why she felt the need to fictionalize it. Imagine, she really lived through revolutionary China with a Western-educated surgeon father. This explains the narration style, but I really wish she would have just told her memoir. An afterword informed me that this is a “fictionalized” look at real events in the author’s life. I found it all very distancing, and it made it difficult to get into the story. Again, that would make sense if it was the present tense, but it isn’t. That would make sense if it was an adult or even an older child looking back, but the narration doesn’t know any more than the child in the moment does. It is a child’s voice, but it is told in the first person past tense. I found myself struggling at first, however. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress springs to mind, so I came in to this book expecting to love it. I read some really amazing books set in China in undergrad. Wong, disappears, Ling really starts to realize that this revolution is no dinner party. Everything in her apartment complex starts to get scary with speakers blaring Mao’s teachings all day and more and more rules, but when her upstairs neighbor, Dr. She hears talk about a revolution, and it comes home when her father’s study is converted into a one-room apartment for Comrade Li. She enjoys her English lessons with her father and hates that her mother makes her eat things like seaweed and tofu. Ling lives in China with her surgeon father and traditional Chinese medicine doctor mother.
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