THIS WONDERFUL BOOK, elegiac, poignant, and recreative of a lost world, came to me after a year of reading bad novels about China by Chinese women: cheap, sensationalist, thrill-seeking - books without merit, peddled by publishers panting for profit from something, anything, Chinese-y.

Now Anniing-chin, who teaches Chinese history at Yale, has had the tremendous luck to interview four Chinese sisters born between 1907 and 1914, all miraculously still alive and eloquent. Their lives began at the tail end of the Manchu empire, in a family of great wealth, refinement and learning. Chin

Literary Review

May 2003

Categories

Jonathan Mirsky

Sweet and Sour

Case Closed?

They Have Been at the Core of Great Events

Tutorials from a Transvestite

Dog Days

What’s Behind the Blue Door?

Communist Poster Boy

Invasive Procedures

Flow Country

A Right Way to Remember?

Girls Allowed

Dig for Victory

Crossing the Yalu

Dining at Lizard’s Thicket

Escape from Entebbe

Wild West

Sage Government

Mission Impossible

One Man and His Lama

Stealing the Crown’s Jewel

Tale From Tiananmen

The Shanghai Beat

Rebel Province

Picture The Revolution