Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos
by Emily Wu, Larry Engelmann
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Book Summary Information
Author: Emily Wu, Larry EngelmannEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-03
ISBN: 0375424288
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Book Reviews of Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos
Book Review: Prior knowledge of China's history is not required.
Summary: 5 Stars
My wife and I met Emily Wu at SIUE while on her book tour. Her story was amazing, so we had to buy the book to get the details.
It normally takes me about a year to read a book, but this one I devoured in a matter of days. The perspective of the book grows as she grows. In the beginning it is written as though you are only a couple feet tall - the details are in the words she hears, people's feet and the underside of cribs and tables. Later on she gets taller and you start to experience more of the people around her. But, like the limitations put on a pre-teen, she can only see so much and know so much, therefore her story is limited to just what she could see and understand. You feel as though you are a child right alongside her.
Often I found myself trying to figure out what things meant (names of Mao's movements and doctrine), but that just muddled the story. At times you feel like more should be written about the backstory of the Red Guard, but if you think about the fact that she didn't know much about them at the time it leaves it all in that child-like perspective. She writes about what she saw and read and experienced as a child, especially her reactions to how it changed the people around her.
The tempo is well-paced and manages to catch you off-guard. It covers issues like capping and de-capping, the invasion of the Red Guard at the Anhui University campus in Hefei, book burning, cleansing of the "Old" ways, living conditions, food, suicide, female infanticide, arranged marriage, bound feet, class struggles, child-on-child violence and much more.
When you are finished, you will view your life through a new pair of glasses. You won't be able to go 5 feet without finding 100 things to be truly thankful for.
Summary of Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos
?It is my hope that this memoir may serve as a reminder and a memorial to all of the children who were lost in the Chaos,? Emily Wu writes at the beginning of Feather in the Storm.Told from a child?s and young girl?s point of view, Wu?s spellbinding account?which spans nineteen years of growing up during the chaos of China?s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution?opens on her third birthday as she meets her father for the first time in a concentration camp. A well-known academic and translator of American literary classics, her father had been designated an ?ultra-rightist? and class enemy. As a result, Wu?s family would be torn apart and subjected to an unending course of humiliation, hardship and physical and psychological abuse. Wu tells her story of this hidden Holocaust, in which millions of children and their families died, through a series of vivid vignettes that brilliantly?and innocently?evoke the cruelty and brutality of what was taking place daily in the world around her. From watching helplessly as the family apartment is ransacked and her father carted off by former students to be publicly beaten, to her own rape and the hard labor and primitive rituals of life in a remote peasant village, Wu is persecuted as a child of the damned.
Wu?s narrative is poignant, disturbing and unsentimental, and, despite the nature of what it describes, is filled with the resiliency of youth?and even humor. That Emily Wu survived is remarkable. That she is able to infuse her story with such immediacy, power and unexpected beauty is the greatness of this book. Feather in the Storm is an unforgettable story of the courage and silent suffering of one small child set in a quicksand world of endless terror.
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