|
August 18, 2009 Aisling stars in CharlieMoore.com commercial with Red Sox players Tim Wakefiled and Jason Veritak.
July 21, 2009 Aisling speaks with Deborah Harper, President of Psychjourney Podcast.
 Listen to interview here.
July 5, 2009 Aisling speaks with Dr. Perter Laufer of “The Peter Laufer Show” on Green 960AM.
Listen to interview here.
September 8, 2009 Aisling talks with Judy Buswick, the host of Writers on Chemlsford TV station
October 26, 2009 Aisling reads at Wellesley College
December 7, 2009 Aisling reads for the Harvard community
February 23, 2010 Aisling gives a talk at Northeastern University - Click here to view PDF file
Boston Herald News Story July 12, 2009
NEWS STORY Boston Herald 12 July 2009
The heart of a `Tiger'; Unwanted in China, she escaped into education, work and life in Boston
By MARIE SZANISZLO
© 2009 Boston Herald Library. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights reserved.
Aisling Juanjuan Shen remembers being beaten by her father at the age of 8 because she forgot to feed their ducklings, and running out of the house to the edge of a nearby river, followed by her mother.
"Why don't you jump?" her mother asks. "Why don't you just jump, if you're that brave?"
It's one of the many turning points in "A Tiger's Heart: The Story of a Modern Chinese Woman" (Soho Press, $24), her autobiography, which traces her journey from poverty and illiteracy in the rice paddies of rural China to the cities where she seeks her fortune in the boom of the 1990s before finding freedom in the United States.
"My whole life, I had been running," said Shen, a 34-year-old Boston equity analyst who began her memoir while an undergraduate at Wellesley College. "Wellesley was a place in my life where I had time to stop and think. I just wanted to heal."
A girl in a culture that prized boys, she was so unwanted as a child that her father waited a week after her birth to even name her.
As she grew older, her mother called her "useless" because she was no good at planting rice or doing household chores. She was 22 and living in China when she learned the real reason for their resentment: She was the product of her mother's rape by a local bureaucrat.
Shen found refuge in books, becoming the first person from her village to attend college. Afterward, she landed a government- appointed job as a middle school English teacher in a small town in China - a plum assignment for a peasant. When she eventually left, yearning to be a "city girl," her parents disowned her.
"Everybody thought I was crazy, throwing away this `iron bowl'; in other words, I had food for life," she said. "But I was going nuts in a small town because there's a mode you're supposed to follow - what you wear, who you date. And I was earning $30 a month as a teacher. I had had enough poverty."
Over the next four years living in China, Shen lived as a homeless saleswoman, had sex with her boss, stole clients from her company and took kickbacks from foreigners - all in her single- minded pursuit of success.
"The funny thing is, I had money, but I still hated myself," she said.
She married an American she met on Yahoo, partly so she could come to the United States - the "land of dreams," she writes in her book, "where everyone could own his own car."
Her parents, both illiterate, have not read her book. But she has made her peace with them and no longer blames herself for their failure to show her love when she was a child.
"On one of my trips home, my mother told me, `We were so poor, we were working like two dogs on the rice field,' " she said. "This is how they were brought up. They were so exhausted every day, they didn't know how to care for children."
Today, Shen is divorced and lives alone in a basement studio in the South End, where she keeps her Wellesley diploma on her desk, next to a handwritten note of encouragement that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a fellow alumna, sent after Shen gave her a copy of her book.
"For the majority of my life, my goal was to make my parents happy, even if it meant making myself suffer," Shen said. "To my mother, I'm still a failure; I have no husband, no kids, no car. But today, I'm not living for my parents anymore. I'm an independent woman, supporting myself in America. I feel good about myself. I don't need to please my parents anymore. I live for myself."
top
|
