Daughter of the River: An Autobiography

by Howard Goldblatt (Translator), Hong Ying (Author)

• New

  Illustrated
  1999

  $17.13

  Daughter of the River is a memoir of China unlike any other. Born during the Great Famine of the early 1960s and raised in the slums of Chongqing, Hong Ying was constantly aware of hunger and the sacrifices required to survive. As she neared her eighteenth birthday, she became determined to unravel the secrets that left her an outsider in her own family. At the same time, a history teacher at her school began to awaken her sense of justice and her emerging womanhood. Hong Ying's wrenching coming-of-age would teach her the price of taking a stand and show her the toll of totalitarianism, poverty, and estrangement on her family. With raw intensity and fearless honesty, Daughter of the River follows China's trajectory through one woman's life, from the Great Famine through the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square.

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $4.13

  The autobiography of a young girl growing up in Mao's China. Hong Ying grew up in a slum on the banks of the Yangtze, an area permanently veiled in fog and steeped in superstition. Life was precarious and Hong Ying, the youngest of the six children, grew up afraid that she would be condemned to a life of carrying sand and emptying chamber pots. Gradually, Hong Ying began to try and solve some of the mysteries which had seemed to surround her early life: a stalker who had followed her since she was a child, a VD record in her father's file, and a persistent feeling that there was something strange about her birth. Among her discoveries, Hong Ying learnt that her mother was once married to a Triadman who had died in a labour camp as a counter-revolutionary, while her father, now a blind sailor, had several times barely escaped with his life during the civil war. Under the corrupt rule, her mother had taken extreme measures to keep the children alive while several of her relatives starved to death during the Great Famine. Moreover, Hong Ying's stalker turned out to have an astoundingly close connection with her. After the tragic deaths of both her first lover and her first child, Hong Ying decided she had to take control of her own life: she left home and worked hard to become a published poet and a novelist. After the events in Tian'anmen Square, she left China to live in London.