Excellent.

Canceled midstream. Threw my arms up and surrendered. Such a horridly, tediously terse style packed with details that are so trivial as to make one's head pop. And yet such an intriguing plot.

I hate it when they hook you right in with some type of foreshadowing. It's the worst type of offense when a writer decides to say, "This bizarre and terrifically terrible thing happened" and spend the entire book explaining everything that happened before it (and I mean everything, from the late 18-effing-00s) until reaching that point (which I have not yet reached, and do not intend to, thank god) and realize that the whole book was a waste of time.

Please spare yourselves. Surely, you can Wiki this Mah Yen and read her CONDENSED life story in five minutes rather than read this book. Long, painful, and without anything to merit reading it, a quite futile attempt at interesting memoir-writing. ( )

The first quarter of is a bit hard to get into, but after that I was hooked. ( )

V. interesting book. A look into the history of 20th century China. The writing style is not exactly captivating, but the story is and I really enjoyed the addition of Chinese proverbs/idioms. ( )