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Loading... Yeh Yeh's House: A Memoirby Evelina Chao
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This memoir is many stories in one. Chao's family is an immigrant one and struggles to integrate into American society. Her trip to China to meet her Chinese relatives opens her eyes to family history and the struggles of the Chinese people past and present. (1987). Chao and her mother travel through various regions of China for 5 weeks and have incredible adventures while she learns more and more about her heritage (and her mother). This is a fascinating book and one that I will remember for a long time. ( )
As a girl ... Chao corresponded with her grandfather, Yeh Yeh, a renowned poet and professor of English living in Beijing. He wrote, You must always be yourself. ... A viola player in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Chao didn't visit ... until 1987, making the pilgrimage with her ... mother. Writing with striking directness and lucidity, Chao chronicles both unexpectedly arduous adventures and life-altering revelations. Keenly aware of the contradictions at work in this brutal and beautiful land, she exquisitely articulates the hard-won wisdom and the complex emotions inherent in the difficult lives of her kind and resilient relatives, many of whom suffered horrifically during the Cultural Revolution. Chao also discovers her mother's true self and experiences a sense of belonging she has never felt before. Utterly unaffected and yet profoundly affecting, Chao's resplendent tale of unbreakable family ties incisively illuminates the deep meaning of inheritance. Awards
Growing up Chinese in Virginia in the Fifties, Evelina Chao's sense of historical or cultural context was colored by the images contained in her grandfather Yeh-Yeh's letters and news of his life as an eminent poet, philosopher, and theologian in Beijing. Her geologist father and biologist mother suffered a kind of cultural dyslexia in the American South, having fled Beijing after the Maoist Revolution in 1949. The young Evelina, foreign and isolated, believed that in China she would find the meaning of her life. And then she found music. The rigors of training to become a professional classical musician seduced her into thinking she no longer required Yeh-Yeh's benediction, that her Chinese heritage was secondary. When Yeh-Yeh died at 92, she realized that her mythical notions of China had died with him. All that reminded her were her uncles and aunts who still lived in the family house in Beijing. Accompanied by her mother, acting as her interpreter and all-around passport, she traveled to Beijing when China was undergoing rapid transformation following the Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s, two years before the Tiananmen uprising. Every trace of old China was being expunged, the ancient neighborhoods plowed under. "Yeh-Yeh's House" is a voyage of self-discovery and mother-daughter understanding set against the backdrop of a China that no longer exists. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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