Review by New York Times Review
in china, everyone has a home. But most have never lived there. Laojia, translated literally, means "old home" and the phrase denotes the ancestral wellspring of a paternal lineage. In a restless, rapidly urbanizing nation with at least a quarter- billion people on the move, most Chinese are several towns removed from their "old homes." Yet in a land of such mass displacement, where unlovely Communistera cities are being gutted and equally unlovely capitalist-era ones are materializing in their stead, people still confer an almost talismanic importance to their laojia. Michael Meyer, a Minnesotan who went to China as one of the Peace Corps' first volunteers there, and Xiaolu Guo, a writer and filmmaker who grew up in a salt-spattered Chinese fishing village, explore the meaning of home in a nation perpetually in transition. The China they describe in their memoirs no longer exists, covered by layers of concrete, glass and fiber-optic cables that have tethered even the most isolated farmer to the modern age. Still, it is the journey through heady, whiplash times that helps us understand where the nation is going. If the 21st century is to be China's era, it's important to know how it will get there. As with so many Chinese born during the Cultural Revolution, Guo's roots are both tangled and tragic. Battered by a political purge, her parents offload their baby girl to a childless couple. But food is scarce. The foster family can't grow enough yams for an extra mouth. Instead, until she is almost 7, Guo must live with her destitute grandparents in a fishing hamlet where sustenance comes from strips of kelp and watery gruel. Even when her parents take her back and she moves to the grimy city of Wenling, Guo is motivated most by a need to sate her hunger. At one point, she traps a bird and eats it with such urgency that she gulps down feathers and guts. Emotionally, she is also starved, particularly by her mother. In Guo's world, neither love nor any other sentiment is easily expressed. "Silence was common in Chinese culture, it served a purpose," she writes. "Never mention the tragedies, and never question them. Move on, get on with life_" China has changed so much over the past few decades that it's easy to forget how much the vestiges of mass famine - both physical and psychological - still shape the national consciousness. When Guo wins a place at the Beijing Film Academy - one of only 11 successful applicants out of 7,100 candidates - she seems almost as excited by the plenitude of the canteen as she is by classes studying Godard and Kubrick. Meyer arrives in Sichuan Province in 1995, charged with teaching English to country pupils. A college administrator, who is a member of the Communist Party but also a lover of British Romantic poetry, dictates what Meyer's curriculum should cover: the Bible, the stock market and the Beatles. Filling one's belly is no longer an all-consuming endeavor but China remains a place with a great cuisine and lousy food. Meyer spends years suffering from food poisoning. 1 studied in the eastern city of Nanjing the year before Meyer arrived in China and later covered the country as a reporter. His descriptions of the 1990s and early 2000s awakened my memories: the ambitious men with their pagers clipped to pleather belts; the young women click-clacking in heels and halfrolled pantyhose; the endless questions about life in America, especially how much everything cost. (Meyer's recollections also echo those of "River Town," the 2001 memoir by his fellow Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler, who now writes for The New Yorker.) Like Guo, Meyer ends up in Beijing, where he teaches at an international school, writes freelance stories and courts a feisty woman from Manchuria who will become his wife. His Beijing is a city so dedicated to self-improvement that it reflects little on what is lost on the way. "Maybe," Meyer writes, "Beijing kept tearing itself down to bury its unexamined past." Meyer will go on to write a book about the destruction of Beijing's traditional alleyways, "The Last Days of Old Beijing," as well as "In Manchuria," which chronicles the transformation of his wife's hometown in the rural northeast. But his memoir, like Guo's, also captures a China where the syncopation of pile drivers only adds to the drumbeat of national optimism. I lived in Beijing back then. As in China as a whole, the sense of possibility in the capital was intoxicating, even if the ghosts of students massacred near Tiananmen Square lingered. Guo documents performance art in which exhibitionists eat human placentas to critique China's one-child policy. The police descend on grungy artist colonies but self-expression flourishes. Today's Beijing is sanitized and modernized. Bentleys and Serrano ham are on sale. But the city is no longer a playground for struggling artists or idealistic intellectuals. Late last year, entire warrens inhabited by migrants were razed. And under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, the Chinese dissident movement has been starved of oxygen. So many of my friends and acquaintances - lawyers, writers, activists and artists who dared to articulate a different dream for China - have either left the country or are in jail. Guo exited early when she won a scholarship in 2002 to study film in London. She is now a British citizen and has written novels in English, like "A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers." In 2013, Granta named her one of the best young British novelists. When her memoir veers to exile in Europe, its emotional punch is weaker, just as Meyer's story lags when he strays from Sichuan, Beijing and Manchuria. While he criticizes foreign correspondents for their facile coverage of China, his dispatches from Tibet and Xinjiang, vast lands on the edge of the Chinese Empire, also rely on quick anecdotes to fill out a larger truth. Still, Meyer is an amiable narrator, and he introduces the reader to some of China's greatest paradoxes, notably a pride in history that coexists with a compulsion to destroy the past. Guo uses her book to explore another contradiction: the role of women in a society where Chairman Mao deemed that women should hold up half the sky even as he kept a stable of concubines for his pleasure. Born long before the Communist revolution, Guo's grandmother was a child bride considered so insignificant that she lacked a name. The Communist census-takers who came to her remote fishing village were appalled by this relic of a feudal past, with her bound feet and bent body. By contrast, Guo's mother starred in revolutionary operas after her factory shift was over. Yet Chinese women are still owned and exploited. While confiding to dorm mates at the Beijing Film Academy, Guo realizes the pervasiveness of the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager. Her best friend throws herself out of a window because of a man. Being a mistress is now a career choice for young women in China. Both Meyer and Guo begin their memoirs with quotes from "Journey to the West," a classic 16th-century Chinese fable starring a Buddhist monk and a magical monkey. In search of Buddhist scriptures and enlightenment, man and monkey venture to India. For her part, Guo is raising her daughter in London. Meyer now teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Perhaps their elegies for vanished homes in China required distance to write. After all, in these mutable times, a laojia exists not so much on a map but in the heart. In a land of mass displacement, Communist-era cities are yielding to capitalist-era ones. HANNAH beech is the Southeast Asia bureau chief of The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 4, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
China hand Meyer, whose nonfiction The Last Days of Old Beijing (2008) and In Manchuria (2015) have won universally high praise, along with travel-writing awards, details his beginnings in then-tiny Neijiang, China in Sichuan Province in 1995 as a Peace Corps volunteer so callow that he must implore his mother in an early letter to send him boxes of Stridex acne pads. After his requisite two years, Meyer would make his way to Beijing, where the news was made and where he would meet his future Chinese wife. Their charming, twisting story proceeds all the way to the 2008 Beijing Summer Games. Meyer has a sharp eye both for the details of two such contrasting cities, but also for the seismic changes China would undergo in a mere 20 years. There's neither outsize pride, nor false modesty, here, but instead a humility gained from an immersion that finds him continually off-balance, which creates its own sort of wisdom.--Moores, Alan Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Former Peace Corps volunteer Meyer (The Last Days of Old Beijing) continues to present his fascinating and worthwhile impressions of China. He explains that, unlike his first book, this latest work is mostly chronological impressions of lessons learned over time. Readers have an additional treat here in that Meyer shares his charming and challenging courtship of Frances, his wife whom he met while living in China. Frances's story brings further depth and insights to Meyer's observations and experiences of the country. For example, her mother used to tell her to finish what was on her plate because there were starving people in America. Meyer's comments are priceless; when his apartment was as cold as an icebox, he reported, "I called Frances and asked her how to turn on the radiator. She laughed. 'You can't. Beijing turns it on for you.'" VERDICT Those planning an actual trip to China as well as armchair travelers will be enlightened and entertained by this exceptional book.-Susan G. Baird, formerly with Oak Lawn P.L., IL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Impressions of China from an experienced guide.From 1995 to 1997, Meyer (In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, 2015, etc.) was stationed in a small town as a Peace Corps teacher of English. He later went on make bilingual travel journalism his livelihood, and here, he provides a humorous, detailed chronicle of the kind of bewildering, bracing contact impressions between him and the Chinese that illustrate both the huge divide between the two countries as well as the shared humanity. What he underscores throughout is how rare seeing a white person was for most Chinese at this transitional time and the curiosity of the Chinese students about Americans. Many admitted outright that they had been taught to distrust America, yet they liked him, whose name transliterated in slang as "Sold Son" or "Heroic Eastern Plumblossom." Speaking Chinese that sounded like a Sichuan farmer's, Meyer had many delightful and appalling adventures, and he delineates his experiences with a great verve and a light hand. He recalls the trepidation he felt when locals menacingly shouted their word for "foreigner" at him. But he also experienced a curious opening of the Chinese mind, a process that had begun some years earlier when Deng Xiaoping famously declared, "we have nothing to fear from the West." As a teacher, Meyer was urged to "teach the Beatles," which turned out to be "sound pedagogical advice." The author posted many of his early writings to publications in the U.S. as well as to his family via letters. Eventually, love intervened, in the form of a fellow teacher at his new school in Beijing; Frances was a bright student thwarted in her ambitions until she met Meyer. The author depicts many moving moments, such as the wonder of one student when he brought them (for "extra credit") to Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1999: the 10th anniversary of the famed clash. Some of the impressions are dated, but the majority are charming and revealing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
