Heard about from Miz B at Should Be Reading 10/17/2008

Meihong grew up during China's Cultural Revolution and at age 17 joined the People's Liberation Army. Her unwavering patriotism and desire to excel brought her into the elite intelligence courps where she was asked to spy on a vising American professor. Their freindship and her growing disillusionment result in his expulsion and her arrest, imprisonment and interrogation. Her memoir follows a small-village girl as she journeys into the rigid and corrupt structure of the PLA and then to her own struggle to survive and recover.

It took me a while to get into this one, it's an odd mix of linear narrative and looking back so you feel you constantly need to be aware of what date she is talking about! It didn't touch me as much as Wild Swans did but then it is very much about one generation of chinese women really with just small moments of referring to the older generations. It's not so much about love as living in a restricted environment with no security or safety being constantly spied upon. ( )

The subtitle may cause confusion. Many readers have complained about this book not being a love story the title claims. Reviewers question Xu Meihong's motive in marrying Professor Larry Engelmann. "She loves him, or does she?" Comments like this flood the reviews. Love and romance aside, *Daughter of China* tells of all the oppressive, threatening, secretive, manipulative practices of the Communist Party. Much of what happened to Meihong and her family, as she has noted, is what foreigners don't see and beyond their imagination. "It doesn't mean it's not there just because you don't see it."
Xu Meihong grew up during the upheaval of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution and was admitted into the PLA (People's Liberation Army) at the age of 17. Selected as one of the 12 Pandas, she was among the country's sharpest women matriculated at the Institute of Interational Relations in Nanjing. She became a member of the elite intelligence corps and was told to spy on visiting American professor Larry Engelmann. As Meihong got to know the professor, she realized "this man has nothing to do with breaching Chinese national security" and Meihong's old loyalties to the Red party began to shake. She started to "have compunction" for Larry and tried to protect him from being pursued or possibly arrested by the Chinese government. When their friendship was discovered, Meihong was arrested, beaten, interrogated, and imprisoned by PLA Colonel. She decided that she would not sacrifice Larry in exchange for her own life. When told to sign a forged petition that falsely accused Larry of raping her, Meihong firmly took her ground and refused. Professor Engelmann was asked to leave the country. Upon expulsion from the Institute and thus the PLA, Xu Meihong was sent back to her village in Lishi in Jiangsu province. She was forevered marked by the government and that "there will never be a normal life for her in China again." Her dossier will forever her everywhere she settles down.

This book is stunning in the way how Meihong Xu has disclosed some of the darkest PLA practices. She recalled the warning given to all incoming cadets about keeping everything confidential: the Institute's location, phone number, contents of the courses, modes of training, etc. Yet in this book she has gone through even the details of their rifle practice, how the cadets were required to work the AK-47 blindfolded because enemies could spew an attack at night. She talks about her interrogation by PLA colonel in gory details. "The truth, is what [the PLA colonel] say it is. It is not for you to decide or to judge." Therefore, if one proclaims innocence upon his arrest, it will only compound the seriousness of one's wrongdoing.

The book also depicts power struggle wintin the Communist Party. The country finds itself at a point where the old conservatives, those who disfavor party reforms, conflict with the younger party reformists. When Meihong was arrested for her association with a foreigner (which affects national security as the PLA claims), the colonel wanted desperately to use her and her relationship with Larry to unmask, discredit and purge a clique of PLA officers who had been working quietly for broad reforms in the military.

If Anchee Min's *Red Azalea* has been a joltingly honest account of life under Mao China, *Daughter of China* is an extraordinary tale of how a PLA officer with a bright, promising future battles turns herself into an enemy of the PLA and battles for her love and freedom. Meihong had seen firsthand how the Party and the PLA used deception and lies to confound its own and to turn friend against friend and lover against lover, even family member against family member. In a sense, *Daughter of China* is more realistic than *Red Azalea*. The tales about Meihong's aunt Lingdi being purged, her mother working far northeast during the famine to support the family, her great-grandfather being dropped in boiling oil again testify to the austere, oppressed lives of common people under Mao China. ( )