(This small piece is based on the first two chapters of the book, interviews given by its author, news reports (e.g. by the Guardian, Forbes, Daily Beast – sorry, the last one really is the name of a news outlet), fact checking by Dr. Shimin Fang and many other people in the cyberspace, and the author's own responses to questions. It's by no means a complete summary of the book. Please buy the book if interested. Nor is the purpose to make fun of human suffering. There is compelling evidence that the `crimes' cited here are either fabrications or exaggerations. I asked myself, what would Mark Twain or Jay Leno for that matter, who sees humor in a glass of water, say about this? The piece came out of such thinking and the belief that humor can not only help us see through bent truth and broken lies, but also help people who really suffered HEAL. I don't pretend to fully understand what is going on, for there are so many versions of so many stories. But I've tried as much as I can to verify the details. I'll stand corrected gratefully if readers can let me know mistakes I may have made about any truth or fabrications.)
The author gathered courage and a magnet for crimes when she decided to revisit her early life during the historic sewage known as the Culture Revolution of China (1966-1976). She came back with a few episodes of Law and Order, `CRC'. Make no mistake, her childhood up until 1966 would make a middle class American family jealous, happy life in a McMansion in Shanghai, with a garden that captured the beauty of four seasons, loving parents and siblings, and did I mention the 11-course French-Chinese fusion dinner every night? Was Chairman Mao's China really this good back then? Let's leave the question to historians.
But everything took a nosedive for her in that summer when the Culture Revolution started. By the way, all references to time and space here are used in the loosest sense and should not be taken seriously, since the author declared that this is about HER (storied) life, not about HIStory. For the next ten years, she experienced or witnessed (or thought she witnessed but later retracted to `emotional memory', aka, bad dreams) among other tragedies (again, please buy the book), child labor camp, child soldier, and execution of horses. No, make it execution BY horses.
Never setting her foot in a classroom for those 10 years, the heroine emerged as prepared as one can be to go to college as soon as college education was formally restored in China for the elite few the year after the Culture Revolution. She received four years of free college education (our middle class American family is now green with jealousy). But wait, there was a condition. All female students got to be checked for their period regularly in college, sometimes by quite invasive measures (this is the only place the author lost me. I swear). Nobody knows what the male students had to go through.
Anyway, by her fourth year in college (we are probably talking about early 80s), the author decided to write a thesis on infanticide of baby girls as an adverse outcome of China's infamous one-child policy. She saw many such unspeakable atrocities with her bare eyes, but there was nothing she could do except for counting the number and writing her paper, you know, live to tell the story. The author left no doubt about why she didn't report to the authority after witnessing the very first crime or try to save some babies. Her thesis either got published somewhere, or was mentioned in a Chinese newspaper article on gender equality, or happened to be remotely related to a book by an American writer on abortions in China - we'll have to wait for her latest words on this one. The truth is, President Bush, the real US president in the 80s, heard about her paper, got mad, and decided to sanction the UN, or to ask the UN to sanction China (here, the author lost me again. I confess). By now, the reader should easily understand that although she had no trouble graduating from a communist college with this seemingly anti-government thesis for her degree (what was her major anyway? Wasn’t it literature? Never mind), the Chinese police, however, wouldn't let her alone and arrested her. Of course, not to be outdone by his US counterpart, the leader of China at the time, Deng Xiaoping also heard about her case and asked about her. Not sure what Deng wanted, in fact nobody knows till this day, the authority ended up sending her to the University of New Mexico to study. They must have been fooled by the name and thought it was a university IN Mexico. For why would they deport or exile (both words lost in translation according to the author, used here only for the lack of a replacement) her to the United States, the best place on earth back then? So her family threw her a farewell dinner party with piled up yummy dishes, but forgot to give her some pocket money when she left for the States. Granted, U.S. dollars could be hard to get in China in those days, unlike today ...
The heroine became the victim of a free-ride-turned-kidnapping the very first day on American soil in Albuquerque (are you kidding me? Who would have thought this is an American city). A father of three locked her up in his home so that she could baby-sit his kids while he went to work. Fortunately, she was rescued by the U.S. police before long, and decided not to put any charges, probably because she had seen too much and way worse in China. Starting with only three English words learned through several years of English classes in college (according to a college classmate of hers confirmed by the author herself), `hello', `excuse me', `please', `thank you', `help' (oops, it was definitely 3 words. But exactly which 3 can be challenging to recall after all these years), she picked up English quickly, went to graduate school, and started her new life in the States. (I have a new theory for the 3 English words mystery. Maybe she meant she SAID only 3 words when she first arrived in the US, not she COULD only SAY 3 words, two expressions that could be quite close if spoken in Chinese. You are welcome.) Fast-forward three decades (it's all in the book, Amazon one click buy), she is now a successful entrepreneur, best-selling author, and technology visionary, who predicts that 3D printers will print beer for you 5 years from now (the beer part is meant to be a joke, too handy on a Friday night).
Congratulations, if you don't have any questions about this memoir. You can move on to the next bestseller. If you do have questions, stay tuned for the 2nd edition. Ciao.