this is the longest China book i've ever read.
if you're brought up in China, a thorough Chinese like me, grew up in the peaceful 80s, then this book opens your eyes to the China you didn't know from your rigid history lessons.
it's not about dates, it's someone's personal history, which makes it easy to read. it showed me so much about the mad times of the "natural disaster" years, the cultural revolution, and the fanatic cult of Mao. it reminds me the novel "hundred years of solitude", a world of surrealism.
Read the book, and then you will realize that those things really happened, not just something you vaguely read in a book.
Only downside of the book is that it annoyed me when the writer tries too hard to impress people with her experiences and her early developed self-consciousness and independent thinking. and I'm sure the writing is a somehow exaggerated, that to a point you suddenly think, there's no way all these things happen to one family. It also annoyed me how popular it was among the left wing Brits in the 90s. i can imagine how this book affected their opinion about China till even now.
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