Review - Xiaolu Guo: Once Upon a Time in the East

Xiaolu Guo
Once Upon a Time in the East: A Story of Growing Up (5*)
(American title: Nine Continents: A Memoir In And Out Of China)

What a remarkable memoir this is. Born in 1973 and brought up by her grandparents in malnourished poverty in a remote fishing village in southeastern China, then taken back by her parents to the nearby industrial city of Wenling, before going to study in Beijing, she saw what to some families in Yorkshire would be two hundred years of change played out before she was twenty.

Her massive stroke of luck was to gain one of just eleven places at Beijing Film Academy in competition with over seven thousand other applicants. But of course, you make your own luck. She read and studied to the point of obsession, became fascinated with western literature and the beat generation, and later won a British Council scholarship to the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. She settled in England, but it was still tough until, gradually, her films and novels gained critical acclaim.

At the heart of the memoir is her relationship with her parents. Her father was an artist, earlier imprisoned for “re-education” during the Cultural Revolution. While he was supportive and encouraging, her mother was emotionally hard and distant. Xiaolu resented that, as the daughter, she had to do all the household chores. Otherwise she was left much to her own devices. She suffered sexual abuse by an older boy in Wenling, and instigated an affair with one of her teachers. It sounds almost Dickensian, but it isn’t. What drew me to the book was a newspaper interview in which she dismisses Dickens as overrated, sentimental and lacking in poetry. None of these things can be said of Xiaolu Guo. She writes beautifully, in English, her second language, making nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties China real.

I complained in my last review about best-selling books which leave you without any life-affirming emotion, insight or inspiration. This memoir is not like that in any way. It had me admiring Xiaolu Guo’s intelligence and determination, and her sheer ability to survive, and looking at maps of southeastern China and wondering at the chance of life that enabled her to escape.

There are a number of interesting films of her talking about her books on YouTube, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-ksxzU8Hv0


Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

How Well Do You Know Morse Code?

It was one of those click-bait headings I found irresistible, so I clicked.

Page 1470 of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia falls open automatically as soon as you pick up Volume 2, a page opened so many times fifty to sixty years ago. Opposite is a picture of how the telegram we might have handed in at the post office forty years before that would have been sent by Morse Code to a friend a hundred miles away. On the following pages are more photographs of the incredible electronic equipment of the day: Wonders of the Telegraph Office, How a Picture is Telegraphed, The Wonder Machine That Brings The News. They still captured your imagination as late as the nineteen-sixties.

But it was the table of Morse Code on page 1470 I always turned to. It shows only the letters, not the number or punctuation codes, but it was enough to get started.

Duncan lived across the road. I could see his bedroom window from my bedroom window. Equipped with flashlights, we could send each other messages at night in Morse Code, a short flash for a dot, a long one for a dash, just like the battleships in Sink the Bismark.

••••     •     • – ••     • – ••     – – –   (HELLO)

After a long pause he replied

••••     •     • – ••     • – ••     – – –   (HELLO)

• – –     ••••     •     • – •     •     • –     • – •     •     – • – –     – – –      •• –     (WHERE ARE YOU)

Then after another long pause

• – –     ••••     • –     –     (WHAT)

The problem was, of course, that it takes so long to become proficient in Morse Code we couldn’t do it. Apart from having nothing to talk about. We were never able to send messages from one end of the street to the other, or get our Cubs Signaller Badges. You have to take your hats off to the Monty Python cast learning to perform Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Morse Code, not to mention Julius Caesar on an Aldis Lamp and Wuthering Heights in Semaphor. Kids don’t know they’re born these days with their Snapchat and Instagram.

On clicking the link I was told that Samuel Morse was born on this day (April 27th) in 1791, and that he patented his telegraph system in 1838 and worked with Alfred Vail to create the Morse Code to translate letters into long and short pulses and back again.

So on to the quiz. How well do you know your dots and dashes? Pretty well, it seems. I got them all right. Our childhoods weren’t entirely wasted.