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Reviews
In her prolog, Shen immediately hooks readers by sharing her thoughts during a business meeting with a man who had appeared on the cover of Forbes: just ten years before, she was homeless and wandering from city to city in China. She had been abused by her parents, who were illiterate peasants, and ostracized by her neighbors. She was also clever and fearless, telling a job interviewer in China who offered her three months to learn Cantonese that she’d need only two! Eventually, as her epilog reveals, she married an American she had met on the Internet, moved to the United States, graduated from Wellesley College, and began this memoir. Her riveting story is peppered with realities like lice, prostitution, abortion, and men literally using women in every way imaginable. As she shows, she also took advantage of people who saw her potential and helped her when she was most desperate. Like a suspense novel, this book is impossible to put down. All readers interested in China, as well as memoir fans (especially of success stories), must read this astonishing title.
—Susan G. Baird, Chicago, Library Journal May 15, 2009, starred review
This unflinching, unapologetic Cinderella story from Chinese immigrant and businesswoman Shen will bring perspective and understanding to readers puzzling over the long history and rapid modernization of China. Born in China’s Yangtze River Delta, a desperately poor area where a child’s worth is determined by the speed with which he or she can plant rice, Shen found solace in schoolwork while dreaming of a better life. In 1991, days before her 17th birthday, Shen became the first person ever to leave her hamlet for college; as a college student, she was “one of God’s superior children”, guaranteed a job for life. What seems to be the answer to her prayers, however, is just the beginning of a long and troubling journey; ahead of her are challenges including a bleak period of homelessness, poor health, lice infestation, and eventual salvation via the Internet and an ambitious Amway representative. Shen’s patient delivery and exquisite eye for detail provide a vivid look into modern Chinese life, but she wraps up her story much too quickly, suggesting that she has a sequel in mind.
—Publisher Weekly, July 2009
In Aisling Juanjuan Shen’s remarkable and assured memoir, a peasant girl born to illiterate parents and bleak prospects rises to prominence as the first person in her village to graduate college. Determined to escape the trappings of rural village life, she leaves the stability of a government-assigned teaching post behind and bravely ventures to the south in search of wealth and happiness. Shen offers a brutally honest and vivid portrait of the early days of China’s economic boom, the fascinating interplay between the provinces, the lives of those who leave and those who remain behind, and the cost of abandoning tradition for the promise of prosperity.
—Felicia C. Sullivan, author of The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here
A woman’s restless, often anguished journey from rural China to an American economic-consulting firm.
Shen was born to illiterate farmers in a commune-controlled hamlet along the Yangtze River. Starved for love from her parents, who were exhausted from long hours planting rice shoots in the fields, Shen found an outlet from the misery in her schoolwork. At age 17, she became the first in her family to attend college, which she soon discovered was nothing like the self-empowering Wellesley College campus she would eventually know. Instead, it was a set of cement buildings in which students simply went through the motions, having been guaranteed a teaching job for life by the government. Smart and ambitious, Shen performed well, but upon graduation lacked the money to bribe the Education Bureau for placement anywhere better than a suffocating small village not far from her own hamlet. As an impoverished English teacher, she fought the loneliness by sleeping with men for companionship while cursing herself for becoming a whore like her mother, who was carrying on a decade-long affair. Shen became pregnant by a married businessman, who smuggled her into the hospital for an abortion (without anesthesia)—the painful description of the event is haunting. The author finally scraped together enough money to visit booming Shanghai in 1995, which inspired her to join other desperate Chinese in “jumping in the ocean”—“giving up governmental jobs and joining the free market” in South China. Defying her parents, she worked as a secretary and Amway salesgirl before returning indebted and covered in lice. A translating job at a knitting company led to opportunities that finally made her rich—but not without moral sacrifice, a requisite (especially for women) in the corrupt business world of New China. Wealthy but still emotionally lost, Shen finally sought and found reconciliation with her family, as well as marriage to an American she met online.
A candid balance of perseverance and despair.
—Kirkus Review, May 15, 2009
A brave and honest tale of one woman's struggle to overcome her circumstances and triumph against all odds.
—Alison Weaver, author of Gone to the Crazies; A Memoir
Read Sample Chapter
Prologue
Chairman Lin is telling me his plans to make his company one of China’s biggest. Sitting across the oval oak table with his chin perched in his hands, he smiles sincerely. Two of his managers, in suits and ties, sit in leather chairs at his sides, all eyes focused on me. At the end of the long table the heavy oil of the impressionist painting on the wall is gleaming in the afternoon sunlight coming through the picture windows. The fresh cut yellow tulips in the vase on the table between us give out the first scent of spring.
This is my first time hosting a management team from China. I feel a little nervous. Gazing at the Chairman, I tell myself to stay alert.
“We are planning to invest two billon dollars in Suzhou to build a couple of new plants.” He points to a dot on the page.
“Oh?” I respond, leaning forward with interest. “I’m from Suzhou.” Here in the faraway land of America, the familiar name warms me.
“Really? No wonder, Ms. Shen. The city is famous for producing sophisticated and pretty women.”
“Well, I’m not from the city itself. I’m from a tiny village in the rural area around Suzhou. My parents are just illiterate peasants.” I smile shyly. “If you saw me ten years ago on the street of Suzhou, my fingernails were still filled with dirt,” I say, probably telling him more than I should.
He chuckles and dismisses my words with a light wave of his hand. “Oh, come on, Ms. Shen.” His expression tells me that he doesn’t think this can be true. The same girl who he is now so eager to impress couldn’t have been one of those dirty countryside people he ignores back in China. I remember standing outside of a big factory in Suzhou fifteen years ago in drizzling rain, desperate for a job, when a boss just like Chairman Lin caught sight of me while walking to his limousine and ordered the guard not to let me through the gate. I stood there and watched him getting into the limo with its tinted windows, never giving me a second look, and then zooming away in a cloud of dust.
Flipping the pages of his presentation, Chairman Lin continues to speak about his grand expansion plan.
I nod my head from time to time, but my concentration is broken. My mind can’t help but drift back to those early years. I think of planting rice shoots in the paddies with my bare feet deep in the mud. I can hear the mosquitoes buzzing around my ears and feel the leeches sucking the blood from my calves. I see myself later, wandering penniless in the streets. All I wanted at that time was a hot steamed bun. It was years ago, but it feels like yesterday.
This man, who once appeared on the cover of Forbes, sits here flattering me, while my whole life I have begged one powerful man after another for a slice of opportunity. I’m in this gorgeous office in Boston’s financial district dressed in a black suit, but just ten years ago I was literally homeless wandering from city to city in China.
I tell myself that it would be silly to try to convince this multimillionaire that what I said is true. Even if I told people a fraction of the struggles I have gone through, few would believe me. I’m only thirty-three, but I’ve faced enough for a hundred lifetimes.
This is my story.
* Chapter 1 *
The Shen Hamlet, where I was born, is a small rice farming village in the heart of the Yangtze River Delta. Surrounded by rice paddies and mulberry bush land at one side and a small river the other side, the hamlet had only about fifty villagers.
My parents, the Shens, lived in the center of the hamlet. I was their first child. Old Auntie Feng, the toothless neighbor who had delivered me in our thatched shack, always said that the year and time of my birth, seven o’clock in the evening in September 1974, portended that I was a tiger coming out of its den—nothing but trouble. And it did seem like I was trouble from the start. When I was a week old, my father took the family residence booklet and went to the commune office to report my birth so that we could get more land and monthly sugar coupons. The cadre behind the desk asked what my name was. Full of disappointment that I was a girl, my father hadn’t bothered to choose a name for me. In haste, he said, “Hmmm. I don’t know. Just call her Mei Yun.”
My mother almost spit in his face when he returned. She called him a pig-head. Family seniority was very important in the countryside. Not only was Mei Yun a dated, dirty name used only in Old China, but because my mother’s name was Lin Yun, the shared second character made it sound like we were of the same generation. My father didn’t say anything in response to her angry scolding. He just sat in silence in his usual spot behind the lime stove. My mother insisted on calling me Juanjuan, meaning “pretty,” instead. Mei Yun, which I like better, means “beautiful clouds.”
I spent most of my infancy on the ridges between the rice paddies, crying and getting tired and sleeping and crying again, while my parents worked with all their might. Our region had very fertile soil, and almost all the villagers made their living working in the rice paddies.
The commune controlled all our land. It allotted blocks of fields based on family size and distributed seeds and fertilizer at the start of each farming season. Rice was planted and harvested twice a year, once in the early summer, once in the late fall. Safflowers were planted in the winter and harvested in the spring for vegetable oil. After each harvest, every family turned over the required amount of rice and oil to the commune and kept the rest for itself. For some reason what was left was never enough to fill our stomachs.
At a meeting at the end of every year, the party secretary would hand a red envelope containing the yearly income to the male representative of each family. The red envelope was always very thin after all the deductions for the seeds, fertilizer, and debts the family owed to the commune. Sometimes it only contained a strip of white paper with a negative number on it.
My parents worked desperately because if the fields were left uncultivated they would starve every day of the year instead of only some days. As the first son in the Shen family, my father was duty-bound to work the fields of his mother, Old Number Two, and of his youngest sister, Number Seven, in addition to our own. My mother had to help, of course, a fact she resented to her bones. Though my parents tended to her fields and fed her, Old Number Two never helped with the housework and never took care of me like a normal countryside grandma. She just rambled around the village and sometimes disappeared for days.
My mother didn’t like sharing our cramped thatched shack with Old Number Two and Number Seven either. Old Number Two had been my mother’s enemy ever since she turned fifteen, when her widowed father, Lianshen, gave her away to become Old Number Two’s daughter-in-law. Old Number Two lost her husband a few years ago before she started to carry on with Lianshen and she was able to convince Lianshen to give my mother away without the betrothal gifts that were usually required. My mother barely knew my father, Yu Lin, at the time, but she had heard that the Shen family had nothing but the four mud walls of their thatched shack. Her hatred for Old Number Two only grew after she married into the Shen family five years later. The two women quarreled every day, and there was hardly any peace in the shack.
When I was almost four, my sister, Spring, came into the world. Shortly thereafter the One Child Policy was introduced in China. From then on, a couple could only have one child and was only allowed a second if the first was deceased or handicapped. When I was young, I often wished that this policy had been enacted earlier, because then my sister would never have been born, would never have taken everything away from me.
Deeply disappointed that he would never have a son to carry on the family line, my father, who had never been very communicative, became even more reticent. He hardly made any noise, spending most of his time at home eating or sleeping, and sometimes you forgot that he was even living in the shack. After Spring was born, I was moved from my mother’s side of the bed to his. Every night my mother held my little sister in her arms and fell asleep while I lay next to my father who barely breathed. I grew unaccustomed to touching my mother, and whenever my finger accidentally brushed her skin, my muscles tightened.
My mother was always exhausted and muddy from working in the rice paddies, and she never smiled. If she had any energy left at the end of the day, she would use it on stamping with fury and swearing at my father.
I knew my mother was a pretty woman because the people in the hamlet said she was like “a flower in a pile of cow dung.” So I looked at my father, five foot eight with small eyes and a small mouth on a flat, ashen face with droopy eyebrows, and I realized he must be the cow dung. I felt sad but then secretly a little happy because the villagers said I didn’t look like my father at all. I had a pair of thick eyebrows like my mother’s. She was proud of her eyebrows. They made her look dashing and spirited.
I didn’t know why she never talked to me and why she was never happy. Soon I learned that I had better keep quiet around her because she was always in a bad mood, especially when she was lying in bed and moaning over the festering wounds on her shoulders from the pole she used to carry rice during the harvest. If I tried to talk to her, she would yell at me to shut up or get lost or worse.
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Letters from Readers to Aisling
Dear Aisling,
I just finished your remarkable book and felt compelled to write you. It was an amazing story, but what I take away with me most is your struggle to find out who you are and make peace with your family.
I believe that we cannot find peace in this life until we come to terms with our families - it was a struggle for me also - and I congratulate you on the peace you seem to have achieved. It doesn't mean there isn't sadness, anger or struggle at times, just perhaps that there is greater acceptance, and a willingness to take connection where possible. A sentence that brought tears to my eyes was when, near the end, you described your mother, despite her lack of warmth, as an octopus whose love was all around you.
Congratulations on all you have achieved - both professionally and personally. I hope this book inspires girls all over the world.
—Rebecca in Ohio
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Dear Aisling,
I checked out your book from the South Pasadena (California) Public Library last Friday, January 29th. I finished reading the entire book within twenty-four hours. I couldn't put it down, even waking in the middle of the night to read more passages.
Your story is so very important, compelling and relevant one for the younger generation of "globalization" kids to hear…Your story is a Chinese story. But, it is also an American story, as well as a universal story. You have experienced life and death. You risked your life to follow that inner part of you that did not settle for giving up on your dreams. You knew in your heart that the traditions of the old China had outlived their usefulness. You had the courage to stand up to those who thought otherwise and thought differently than you did.
…I feel the deepest sense of connection with your story. You have my deepest and sincerest admiration and respect.
—Peter W. Spoto, PhD at University of Southern California
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Ms. Shen,
Wow! I just got done reading your wonderful book. It kept me hooked from start to finish. What a great writer you are. I also admire your honesty. It was a breath of fresh air.
I hope there is a second book in your future.
—Amanda Leitch-Lee
Dear Ms. Shen,
I just finished reading your book and loved it! You have really lived the American Dream! I think a lot of Americans have no idea what life is like in China, especially in the countryside. Your book will help outsiders better understand China and how hard it is for Chinese women, even after all the changes there.
Thanks for writing your story and sharing it with us!
—Susan Blumberg-Kason in Chicago
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Dear Aisling,
Moments ago I finished your book. I have read MANY books written by and/or about Chinese men and women, beginning with Pearl Buck, Amy Tan, Ha Jin, Lisa See, Ms. Chang and many others. The biographical accounts are, by far, the most interesting but often the most painful to read. China's history, in general, seems very painful, but I'm awed by the courage and traditions of its people.
Thank you for sharing your most personal experiences. I did not take your writing lightly; instead, I was inspired by it. I am very old (71) but I can still learn from a young woman like you. I wish you the very best in your life and urge you to continue writing about your experiences. Ha Jin (whom you must know as he is from MA) wrote about his experiences in the United States and it helped me to understand the Asian view of assimilation and, unfortunately, intolerance in the U.S.
I wish you the very best in life and hope that you family in China continue to prosper.
—Brenda Karnes in Maryland
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Aisling,
I picked up your book from the library yesterday by chance and finished reading it in a day. Thanks for telling such an inspirational story.
You are a courageous, intelligent and wise person. You figured out a lot as you go through life. Lots of people don't! They continue to drift through and never learn from experiences. Plus, they continue to blame everyone and everything, but never take the responsibilities to take charge of their own lives.
Thank you again, your story reminds us to remain strong in the face of life.
—Mandy Chung in Boise, MD
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