Memoirs: China - India

"Li was born in 1940 to a harsh and punitive father and an emotionally distant mother. Hyperactive and curious, the lonely little boy was forbidden to go outdoors, and his only companion was his kindly nurse. When the political power shifted, Li's father was imprisoned and the family sent to live in a disease-infested slum." (School Library Journal)

"The author of this absorbing memoir was a misfit in the most misfit-intolerant place on earth. Coming of age during the Cultural Revolution, Kang kept secret diaries, disdained the political sloganeering at his university and was sent away for requesting the suspect novel Doctor Zhivago—crimes that landed him a three-year prison term and resettlement in a peasant commune where the work was almost as backbreaking as in the camps." (Publishers Weekly)

"Although the focus of this memoir is the author's struggle to be loved by a family that treated her cruelly, it is more notable for its portrait of the domestic affairs of an immensely wealthy, Westernized Chinese family in Shanghai as the city evolved under the harsh strictures of Mao and Deng." (Publishers Weekly)

"Jade Snow Wong grew up in a traditional Chinese family in San Francisco's pre-World War II Chinatown. It was a world in which wives were introduced by their husbands as "my inferior woman," rules were taught with corporal punishment, and home life was literally connected to the family business: "As much a part of home as her bedroom were the sewing machines she passed before she came to her bedroom door." (Amazon)

"While this is the story of his life, it is also the story of a family's struggle to balance ambition, expectations, and relationships, and it illustrates to the extreme the pressure many young people face to live up to their own and their parents' expectations. The writing is immediate and emotional, drawing readers into a life of hard work, dedication, music, competition, and performance. Lang Lang's life and creative choices demonstrate a willingness to take chances and trust his instincts, honed through years of battling insular established systems." (School Library Journal)

"Singer Namu describes growing up on the Chinese-Tibetan border in Moso country, "the Country of the Daughters." Detailing her late-1960s, early-'70s upbringing-she was known in her village as "the girl who was given back three times"-she sheds light on the unique matrilineal Moso culture, with its "walking marriages," where women take as many lovers as they want and the men continue to reside in their mothers' homes." (Publishers Weekly)

"In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century." (Amazon)

"The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward." (Amazon)

"Fascinating memoir of a young Chinese girl during the collapse of the Maoist regime. As a schoolgirl, Min distinguishes herself as a young communist--and a high point of her career as head of the Little Red Guard comes when she is persuaded to denounce her beloved teacher as a reactionary, thus ruining the woman's career and possibly placing her life in jeopardy." (Kirkus Reviews)

"Gandhi's nonviolent struggles in South Africa and India had already brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation, and controversy that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself." (Amazon)

"Phoolan became at once both symbol and avenger of atrocities committed against the lower castes-a woman who had taken justice into her own hands and achieved a singular vindication . . . as a creation of the worst aspects of a monstrous social structure, she could lead a credible challenge against the caste system that has defined India since ancient times." (Atlantic Monthly)

"Reversing his parents' immigrant path, a young American-born writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new." (Publisher's description)

"A searing narrative of a Dalit family's odyssey through oppression."(Sahara Times)