Very interesting look at the poverty and hopes of a rural Chinese girl. ( )

Ma Yan and her family live in one of the poorest village in China. Everyday Ma Yan and her two brothers would walk over four hours to get to school, even in the rain and snow. Whenever it get tough, she would think of the sacrifices that her parents had to make in order for her and her brother to stay in school. She would remind herself constantly in her journal all the things her parents have done for her. She pushes herself to work harder in school whenever she thinks of them. Education is the only way she knows how to get her family out of poverty. From Ma Yan’s short journal passages of her every day life, make me appreciate everything I have even more. In a way, it also makes me feel guilty for the things I took for granted such as meat, able to drive to school, and the privilege to go college. ( )

It was a very interesting book to read. On the one hand it made me feel guilty for all the wealth we have and usually take for granted. It was also nice to learn how things work in the Chinese rural community. I was often very moved by the despair that Ma Yan so obviously felt.
I was a bit annoyed by the constant repetition of 'I have to study hard to get a better life and make my mother's life better' or words like these. It almost feels like a mantra to me, if you say it loud and often enough, you automatically start believing it.
What shook me most is, that there's such a ginormous gap in development between urban and rural areas and that the (central) government is not doing anything about it. As it seems from the last part of the book, things haven't changed a lot (yet). ( )

Another long-term TBR down.

This is the diary of a young Chinese school girl who is determined to get an education, despite coming from a poor family. Insight into life in rural Ningxia province and a Muslim Chinese family.

Ma Yan is from a family living on the edge of the abyss of poverty, so much so that her parents must work outside the village to make enough money for her and her brothers' schooling. Ma Yan's love for her mother, as well as her acknowledgement of the debt she owes her, makes the diary even more poignant.

Ma Yan is a dedicated student, making up for classes missed while her family struggled to drum up the tuition fees. Her diary gives us a fly on the wall view of life as a student in a Chinese rural village, the classes, the teachers, as well as the rhetoric and the woeful lack of resources.

The diary entries are interspersed with notes that help you get the most out of Ma Yan's diary, they include family information and updates as well as cultural references. The final part of the book tells us what happens next, how Ma Yan's life continued after the publishing of the original articles. ( )

This book is the translated diary of a young girl in rural China struggling to stay in school. She knows that without an education she will be condemned to a life of poverty and back-breaking manual labor--but in a society that values boys over girls Ma Yan has to be better than everyone else to convince her parents that she deserves this chance just as much as her brothers.
It is so heartbreaking to read through her feelings and even though the translation made the book seem a bit choppy and disconnected I don't feel like it lost any of the raw emotion she wrote down. It also frequently interrupts her diary with explanations of her family, town, and culture. These were particularly helpful in painting a complete picture of her life; otherwise I would not have known why her family desperately needed to collect the fallen snow (there was no well with drinkable water).
After the book was published it garnered so much attention and sympathy that a fund was set up to help girls in Ma Yan's region continue with their education. This is also a fairly recent book and highlights how badly poverty still affects some parts of the world--even places like China where the cities are incredibly technologically advanced and yet their rural areas suffer so terribly. ( )