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    Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China
    Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China
    Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China
    Audiobook11 hours

    Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China

    Written by Xiaolu Guo

    Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller

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    About this audiobook

    Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home. Eventually Xiaolu determined to see the world beyond China for herself, and now, after fifteen years in Europe, her words resonate with the insight of someone both an outsider and at home, in a world far beyond the country of her birth.

    Nine Continents presents a fascinating portrait of China in the eighties and nineties, how the Cultural Revolution shaped families, and how the country's economic ambitions gave rise to great change. It is also a moving testament to the birth of a creative spirit, and of a new generation being raised to become citizens of the world. It confirms Xiaolu Guo as one of world literature's most urgent voices.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateOct 3, 2017
    ISBN9781681688886

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    Reviews for Nine Continents

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    • 5/5
      I find reading about people who have migrated to another country fascinating. This is particularly true of this book. Growing up poor in post-revolutionary China. Guo does an excellent job in taking us back to when she as a very young child lived in a tiny fisherman’s village in southern China. She has been able to make the reader see it from the eyes of her 6 year old self, and has been able to make the story resonate with the point of view of life for one so young with so few experiences. As she grows, and moves to a larger city with her parents, she examines how Mao’s revolution impacted her family. Well-written and worth reading.
    • 3/5
      Parts of this, especially the early part of the book, are good. However, as the book progresses, the story becomes more and more fractured - almost like small stories within stories. This could potentially work, but I didn't find Guo manages this well. For example, her room mate and friend Mengmeng attempts suicide - the opportunity to explore the impact of this upon Guo, or even a wider commentary on unrequited love is missed. There is very little about Mengmeng and her story, which is surprising given the support Mengmeng gives Guo when confronting a past abuser. I would like to have had Guo's observations about Mengmeng's struggle to flourish, as well as Guo's. Instead we get chapter after chapter on 'western boyfriends' with only a few moments of good writing e.g. the explanation about English language and how it appears to a Chinese speaker - (this part is good). So not a bad read overall, but with very mediocre parts which you have to slog through and quite a few missed opportunities to take stories deeper.
    • 2/5
      Author Xiaolu Guo speaks about her childhood and her coming of age in an oppressive, paternalistic China. Raised by illiterate grandparents, she finds her voice through art and writing. Overall, this was a pretty generic book. It is a bit boring, a bit forgettable.
    • 5/5
      I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.I like to read memoirs and especially those where the author is writing about something which really holds your interest. This is one of those books. I found the description of the author's childhood totally absorbing. Her life in a small fishing village, living with her grandparents, was so totally different to my own childhood in the UK. And then suddenly her parents appear from nowhere and she is taken away to live in a city and her life changes significantly.This is a fascinating read. The transition from childhood to independent adulthood and from rural China to the world beyond China is so well described. There are some shocking parts, not least the reflections on identity and the effect of dual citizenship.
    • 4/5
      [Once Upon a time in the East] "The protagonists of my favourite books were all orphans. They were parentless, self- made heroes. They had had to create themselves, since they had come from nothing and no inheritance. In my own way I too was self-made. I was born and then flung aside, to survive in a rocky village by the ocean. If I had to pinpoint a moment when this thought crystallised in my mind, it was that day on the beach in Shitang when I met the art students drawing in their sketch pads facing a sunless, wavy -grey sea . I was six years old and consumed by an ineffable loneliness."Novelist's memoir of growing up in rural China, witness to the dramatic changes as China industrialised. Guo was repeatedly abandoned, once to a childless couple, and then at two to her violent grandfather and his illiterate wife. She is fierce about the lip service paid to gender equality through Communism and the regular abuse many women experienced in reality. At it's best those is a window into a different world, in some cases, as in her childhood fishing community, now all but gone. Her descriptions of witnessing performance art in early 21st century Beijing made me wish the book was longer. Throughout there is the bleak theme of the failure of her relationship with her mother, a family rupture that feels far more universal, if less compelling to me. "For example, my grammar book said: ‘Peter had been painting his house for weeks, but he finally gave up.’ My immediate reaction even before I got to the grammar explanation was: my God, how could someone paint his house for weeks and still give up? I just couldn’t see how time itself could regulate people’s actions as if they were little clocks! As for the grammar, the word order had been and the added flourishes like ing made my stomach churn. They were bizarre decorations that did nothing but obscure a simple, strong building."