Front cover image for Once upon a time in the East : a story of growing up

Once upon a time in the East : a story of growing up

Xiaolu Guo (Author)
Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her. When she is born her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea. It's a strange beginning. Guo's extraordinary memoir is a handbook of life lessons. How to be an artist when censorship kills creativity and the only job you can get is writing bad telenovela scripts. How to be a woman when female babies are regularly drowned at birth and sexual abuse is commonplace. Most poignantly of all: how to love when you've never been shown how
Print Book, English, 2017
Chatto & Windus, London, 2017
Autobiography
317 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
9781784702946, 9781784740672, 9781784740689, 1784740675, 1784740683, 1784702943
967376866
Ebook version :
Shitang: tales of the East China Sea
Wenling: life in a communist compound
Beijing: the whirlpool of life
Europe: in the land of nomads
In the face of birth and death
"As read on BBC Radio 4"--Front book cover