I read this book yesterday - yes, all of it! It was British Columbia's 150th birthday yesterday and I went down to the outdoor concert and sat in my chair for over almost seven hours and in between acts - or during acts I didn't like ... I read!
This is another book that I picked up in my local bookshop and jotted the name down and got it from the library.
It tells the story of Hua Wu from China who arrives in New York to make a life for herself. She ends up working in a Chinatown restaurant and living in a shabby tenement. One day she goes to a park to sit and meets Jane and her two year old daughter Lily, who was adopted from China. Jane is worried that Lily will never know about the culture of her country of birth or her native language so eventually Hua eventually starts babysitting and then becomes Lily's full time nanny.
Jane is a curator at a museum for Asian Art and her husband is a theatre critic - from the moment Hua steps into their house she finds a world far removed from her tenement or her grandmother's house in Fuzhou. Everything is great first of all but then cracks appear in the supposedly idyllic family and Hua feels she must do something to shield little Lily from it all.
This was a very moving story with great descriptions of Hua's early life in China and her transition to life in NYC. I initially picked it up as I would LOVE to adopt a Chinese baby girl and the book, although fictional, really showed me an insight into this. I really liked Hua and admired her a lot - even when she did what she did ... I kind of understood that it was only out of love for Lily. It really makes you think of how incredibly brave immigrants must be to leave their country and journey alone to the Western world where they know nobody at all.
Once again .... I loved it!!!
1 comment:
Owh...I want to read this!!!
Will look it up if we can get it here, sounds *very* interesting to me.
Thanks for sharing :-)
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