In Kansas, while I was twiddling my thumbs and trying to create things to do (jk...well, sometimes), my uncle started talking about this book. Now, both my aunt and uncle are AVID readers. They literally sit together every night after dinner and read for at least 2 hours, or at least I think my aunt is reading when she is using her iPad. Nevertheless, this side of the family is definitely into reading.
What piqued my interest initially was the fact that it was a memoir about growing up in HK during the 1940s, but I was less inclined to read it, when I learned that it was from a 7-year-old's perspective. Even so, I decided to give it a chance and never looked back. I immediately dropped The Idiot by Dostoevsky in order to complete this one.
It captured my attention. In fact, it mesmerized me. With the memory of a 7-year-old and the writing style of an elegant, bookish 90-year-old, one can gleam a whole lot of details interwoven into an interesting story line.
His mother is like me, when I was traveling throughout Central America. She treats everyone with respect, becomes friends with the servants/bus boys (I wish I did this more), takes Chinese classes, loves the culture/symbolism/history, enjoys trying new things and living life. The father, on the other hand, is a bigoted, egotistical man, who can literally sleep all day on weekends and drink gin without doing anything else.
Martin develops his character as one who sides with his mom and even goes a step further by always venturing out into the "unknown," thereby getting into areas such as opium dens and Chinese mafia territories in HK that white people are not allowed to enter. As such, this novel illustrates the cosmopolitan city, the underworld scenes, the problems between the rich whites and the poor Chinese, the dichotomy between the Communist China and the liberal HK and much much more.
One of its weaknesses, however, is that he spells all of the "foreign" words in UK speech, since he is a British writer. Thus, I sometimes had no idea about a word he had phonetically written until about halfway through the book, when I had a stupid epiphany that "oh ya, he meant this -- blank." I guess I'm just used reading it one way and another spelling of the same word only served to confuse me.
P.S. I feel like the only reason why this is so eloquent (in my "humble" opinion, or maybe you just haven't read any of my normal writing) is because I had to write 2 stupid essays today for the GRE. I had to force myself to think and although this is flowing a lot easier than my GRE essays, I definitely know that it helps to write in order to improve one's writing.
Julie Taeko Gramlich // B.A. in Political Economy // UC Berkeley
C: 415-971-7238 // jtgramlich@berkeley.edu
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