Once Upon A Time in the East

Posted on 05 September 2018 by Xiaolu Guo

Ah, Xiaolu, you are so big now Then I heard my grandmother speaking behind the woman, This is your mother, call her mother I stared at the woman, perplexed.Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is six They are strangers to her When Xiaolu is born her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea It s a strange beginning.Like a Wild Swans for a new generation, Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in a picturesque British village Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home.Xiaolu Guo s extraordinary memoir is a handbook of life lessons How to be an artist when censorship kills creativity and the only job you can get is writing bad telenovela scripts How to be a woman when female babies are regularly drowned at birth and sexual abuse is commonplace Most poignantly of all how to love when you ve never been shown how. Free Download eBook Once Upon A Time in the East by Xiaolu Guo – kino-fada.fr If you were a woman in China, Communism was good for you Not very good, it wasn t going to stop the sexual abuse that no one cared about it, it wasn t going to stop the murder of girl babies, it wasn t going to get you fed if there was a brother to feed first, but it was going to get you a name.This is what stuck with me most from the book The local Communist council went to all houses to register the people living there preparatory to the one child policy The author s grandmother was the adu If you were a woman in China, Communism was good for you Not very good, it wasn t going to stop the sexual abuse that no one cared about it, it wasn t going to stop the murder of girl babies, it wasn t going to get you fed if there was a brother to feed first, but it was going to get you a name.This is what stuck with me most from the book The local Communist council went to all houses to register the people living there preparatory to the one child policy The author s grandmother was the adult in the home when they came She said she didn t have a name Just wife of and when she had been a girl, second sister She, as a person, was so irrelevant to her parents, to her father, she hadn t even given her a name The officials were appalled yet again, but not surprised nor that she didn t know her birth date With her bound feet she was almost a tethered animal, just there to cook, clean and be br...Absolutely wonderful memoir by a woman beyond impressive She talks about alienation and perseverance, about loss and art, about growing up and finding herself, and everything in between Xiaolu Guo s life sounds like something out of a movie born to an intellectual who had spent time in a labour camp and a mother who was part of the Red Guard yes, her parents met in prison , given away at birth, and then given back to her grandparents both analphabets her grandmother of a generation where h Absolutely wonderful memoir by a woman beyond impressive She talks about alienation and perseverance, about loss and art, about growing up and finding herself, and everything in between Xiaolu Guo s life sounds like something out of a movie born to an intellectual who had spent time in a labour camp and a mother who was part of the Red Guard yes, her parents met in prison , given away at birth, and then given back to her grandparents both analphabets her grandmother of a generation where having your feet bound was normal their relationship scarily abusive , ripped away again to go and live with her parents, she manages to attend an elite university for film making and then to win a scholarship to study in the UK a country that became her home Her book is a piece of art itself I adored the way she plays with language her not writing in her mother tongue as she has been doing for a while now just adds to the immediacy an... Xiaolu Guo s autobiography tells her remarkable story from adoption at birth through to her career as a writer and film maker based in the UK This abridgement deals with her formative years, living in China in times of transition.Xiaolu Guo is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter and film maker She was born in south eastern China in 1973 Her novel, in English translation, Village of Stone, was shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fic Xiaolu Guo s autobiography tells her remarkable story from adoption at birth through to her career as a writer and film maker based in the UK This abridgement deals with her formative years, living in China in times of transition.Xiaolu Guo is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter and film maker She was born in south eastern China in 1973 Her novel, in English translation, Village of Stone, was shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award It was followed by her first novel written in E...Raw, honest and fascinating. From BBC Radio 4 book of the week Xiaolu Guo s autobiography tells her remarkable story from adoption at birth through to her career as a writer and film maker based in the UK This abridgement deals with her formative years, living in China in times of transition.Episode 1 For the young Xiaolu, her first home was the fishing village of Shitang where she lived with her grandparents.Xiaolu Guo is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter and film maker She was born in south eastern China in 1973 He From BBC Radio 4 book of the week Xiaolu Guo s autobiography tells her remarkable story from adoption at birth through to her career as a writer and film maker based in the UK This abridgement deals with her formative years, living in China in times of transition.Episode 1 For the young Xiaolu, her first home was the fishing village of Shitang where she lived with her grandparents.Xiaolu Guo is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter and film maker She was born in south eastern China in 1973 Her novel, in English translation, Village of Stone, was shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award It was followed by her first novel written in English, A Concise Chinese E...This was a pretty unpleasant read The author had a very hard childhood, a hard student and young adult life, and was lonely and unhappy when she moved to the UK, on a film school scholarship that turned into a permanent move The book does end on apositive note.I skimmed much of the most unpleasant material, and I wouldn t advise reading the memoir when you are feeling low It s shocking how poorly girls and women are treated in China, if the author s experience is typical It is well wri This was a pretty unpleasant read The author had a very hard childhood, a hard student and young adult life, and was lonely and unhappy when she moved to the UK, on a film school scholarship that turned into a permanent move The book does end on apositive note.I skimmed much of the most unpleasant material, and I wouldn t advise reading the memoir when you are feeling low It s shocking how poorly girls and women are treated in China, if the author s experience is typical It is well written.Here s the review that led me to read it may be paywalled On New Year s Eve, she was at a party with film school friends in Beijing listening to a Rolling Stones song It was our new propaganda slogan, she writes, wryly I can t get no satisfaction, but I try and I try and I try China had modernized rapidly as a result of reform and opening up, as the Party catchphrase had it, but dissatisfaction and yearning were everywhere.This unease animates Nine Continents China is now t...It s strange, I don t have any particular intellectual or aesthetic pull toward China but I have been a fan of Xiao Guo s writing ever since I was enticed by her novels that I was shelving while working at the Norwich Millennium Library I read everything they had at the time, which was in 2009 I was excited to find an extract of this autobiography in the Guardian to promote its imminent release which left me jaw on the floor This book is completely transporting, and I got through it in a few It s strange, I don t have any particular intellectual or aesthetic pull toward China but I have been a fan of Xiao Guo s writing ever since I was enticed by her novels that I was shelving while working at the Norwich Millennium Library I read everything they had at the time, which was in 2009 I was excited to find an extract of this autobiography in the Guardian to promote its imminent release which left me jaw on the floor This book is completely transporting, and I got through it in a few short days despite being under a general readers block again which I know is silly and I AM Looking forward to reading other great things by you know who you are I suppose partly what is all absorbing is the f...First, let me say that I love Xiaolu Guo and her writing so going into this, I was biased But bias is not always a bad thing I loved reading this memoir, or collection of essays Xiaolu was and still is such a curious, rebellious, tireless little spirit and it was a pleasure reading about her childhood, despite how difficult aspects of it were She speaks with a frankness and a boldness that almost creates a disconnect in her writing, except it doesn t, and her detachment is like that of a d First, let me say that I love Xiaolu Guo and her writing so going into this, I was biased But bias is not always a bad thing I loved reading this memoir, or collection of essays Xiaolu was and still is such a curious, rebellious, tireless little spirit and it was a pleasure reading about her childhood, despite how difficult aspects of it were She speaks with a frankness and a boldness that almost creates a disconnect in her writing, except it doesn t, and her detachment is like that of a director looking through the lens, guiding, seeing, observing, crafting At times, I did feel like the writing was a little forced or cliched, but I ...Through Xiaolu Guo s memoir you glimpse the life of the rural Chinese after the Cultural Revolution, but before the one child policy Then you glimpse the changes in China as trips to Beijing by bus are possible and then at the end, air travel to Europe and the availability of medical treatment.Her family was poor and they gave her away The poor people she is given to realize that they, also, cannot feed her, so at 2 years old she is taken to her grandparents in a fishing village, later to be Through Xiaolu Guo s memoir you glimpse the life of the rural Chinese after the Cultural Revolution, but before the one child policy Then you glimpse the changes in China as trips to Beijing by bus are possible and then at the end, air travel to Europe and the availability of medical treatment.Her family was poor and they gave her away The poor people she is given to realize that they, also, cannot feed her, so at 2 years old she is taken to her grandparents in a fishing village, later to be retrieved at age 7 by her parents who live in a Communist controlled city Her life is surely representative of thousands of girls in China What is unique about this story is the Xiaolu survived and broke the chains and is able to tell the story.Through her story you see the risk to girls is extreme You see how the ...

English
05 September 2018

Xiaolu Guo