Emei Burell

Presented with a pile of horse manure to move, some people just stand and bemoan their bad luck, but as in the old joke, certain people will grab a shovel and start digging with gusto, convinced that "there must to be a pony in here somewhere." When she found herself caught up in Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution and shipped from her family home in Beijing to a rubber plantation 2,500 miles away, Emei Burell's teenage mother, Yuan, reached for a shovel.

With great determination and a little luck Yuan managed to wrangle education in skills that lifted her past a lifetime of toting latex and hoeing fields and eked out an engineering degree from a cobbled together remote learning study regimen that led to study abroad. It's a Horatio Alger tale set in Communist China.

This is one of those books I wish were twice as long. I wanted more time with Yuan and her stories.… (más)

This book crossed my desk so I decided to pick it up. It's a graphic memoir of a sorts -- the author illustrates her mother's experience as a youth in China during the Cultural Revolution and Down to the Countryside movement during the 1970s. I had a vague understanding of what these things were, and how they impacted China and the world, but this memoir sheds some more light on it. As she was preparing to graduate from middle school, the government was starting to relocate urban youth to the countryside, so they could contribute to rural industries, and she ended up on a rubber plantation far to the south of her home in Beijing. Her own work ethic allowed her to pass through the ranks and find herself a comfortable enough spot in the industrial complex. She felt her lack of education keenly as the revolution came to an end, and worked hard to make it up, eventually succeeding in navigating the dizzying bureaucracy to achieve her degree. The story does describe the faults of the systems put in place to control the population and economy in China, but she also clearly feels affectionate toward her homeland, feeling conflicted when she eventually gets the opportunity to go abroad. This is a lovely story of a woman finding success in a country that seems determined to curtail any ambition.… (más)