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Rating: 
Summary: This book compelled me to dry-heave more than once
Review: Having read a lot of texts translated from Chinese lately for class, I have to say that this is one of the poorest jobs of translating I have ever encountered. Translating from Chinese to English is not an easy job, granted, because Chinese text is pictographic and requires a lot of artistic elaboration on the part of the author to keep the text alive for a Western audience. "A Daughter of Han" is a complete failure in this respect. As a reader, I felt so far removed from the events of the story, it was as though I was hearing an account of the plot from a woman who knew another guy who'd once heard about this lady who'd had these things happen to her that might be interesting if only the storytelling weren't so detached. I suppose one could make an argument that the emotional detachment with which the author treats potentially very dramatic events makes a larger statement about the Chinese culture, but that still doesn't make it worth reading for 250 pages. I could've gotten the same enthusiasm and emotional detachment from the blurb on the back of the book, had I only known better. Plus, if a key point of the book was this unusual treatment of tone, there are definitely tons of books out there that exemplify exactly how to do this without losing the reader, such as "The Stranger." Anyway, I'll wrap this up so as not to be as thoroughly terrible as the book. Bottom line, this book is boring. If you want to find out about how the common people of China lived around the turn of the 20th century, get a good textbook, look up the time period in the index, and read the obligatory social history section. It'll be about a page long. Amen to that.
Rating: 
Summary: I Really Liked this book!
Review: I had to read this book for a core class in college and I thought that I would have hated it. Actually, I really liked it. It told of a Chinese working woman's life. It even gives the reader an insight into her lifestyle and her struggles during this tumuluous time in history. The story even touches on the japanese invasion. I didn't think this biography would be interesting but it was. I would recommended this book to anyone. It is a light read and it is very interesting.
Rating:
Summary: I Really Liked this book!
Review: I had to read this book for a core class in college and I thought that I would have hated it. Actually, I really liked it. It told of a Chinese working woman's life. It even gives the reader an insight into her lifestyle and her struggles during this tumuluous time in history. The story even touches on the japanese invasion. I didn't think this biography would be interesting but it was. I would recommended this book to anyone. It is a light read and it is very interesting.
Rating:
Summary: life of one Chinese woman
Review: Ida Pruitt's biography of Ning Lao T'ai-t'ai (literally "old lady Ning"), a peasant woman of northeast China born in 1867, is a fascinating anecdotal retelling of Ning's personal history as she related it to the author over the course of their two year long friendship. The storyline of Ning's life: childhood, marriage, work, and children, is laid out in a chronological history, broken into separate sections at particular turning points; and yet a cohesive theme of hardship, oppression and poverty, of strong-willed women and weak men is carried throughout not only Ning's tales but also through the stories she relates of her ancestors and neighbors. Pruitt writes in the voice of Ning as if she is translating, but what she is really doing is recalling Ning's stories of her life in the first half of the 20th century. Ning was born into an educated middle class family which had fallen on harder times. Her father wants a better situation for her marriage, but the older husband he choses for her becomes addicted to opium driving the family into poverty. To survive and feed her children Ning must become first a beggar, then a servant to various households: military, Muslim, bureaucrat, and finally to Christian missionaries. And Ning's voice does come across clearly; speaking against concubinage and prostitution, about the penury of employers, the need to support and keep family together. By using a first person retelling of the stories Pruitt gives the impresssion of accuracy, yet there were 7 years between the conversations with Ning and the writing of the book. Also the apparent bias against Japanese in prologue and last chapter together with the pub. date of the book indicate a hidden agenda on the part of the author. Still, although limited to the view of this one woman's experience, Ning's story is reflective of the hardships of life for Chinese women before the Communist era.
Rating: 
Summary: A Slice of Life
Review: Ning Lao Ta'i-ta'i. _The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman. Translated and Transcribed by Ida Pruitt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967. Every now and then I read an entire book in one for one or two reasons a) I have to read a book that I have put off for the time period in which I had to read it b) I become completely engrossed in it. I must say that, in the case of this book, it started off as the former and it ended up being the latter, although I still have to write a paper on it by tuesday. This memoir was was orally transcribed by Ida Pruitt over a two year period in which Mrs. Ning visited her from 1936-38. Pruitt was forced to leave Beijing in 1938 when the Japanese invaded the series. In the brief introduction of the book, Pruitt informs the reader that she does not know what happened to Mrs. Ning after she returned to America. The brutallity of the Japanese army was not as great in Beijing as in such areas as Nanjing and Shanghai,but one can not help wondering about Mrs.Ning who the reader, or at least I, becomes quite attached to. Mrs. Ning begins her tale by detailing how her family became established in the town of P'englai her family history is both entrenched in history and folklore and makes for a fascinting read. The book continues following her life from her childhood, marriage, hard times, working both for government officials and missionaries, and finally living in Beijing. The greatest thing about this book is the extraordinary detail Mrs. Ning goes into describing her everyday life. One can almost see oneself removing the fourth wall of the past and being able to see late Ching China. One gets to see a good picture of opium addiction and the dealings inside yamen, political offices, that are no longer controlled by skilled officials. A great book.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful book
Review: This book truely helped give insight into the life of a working chinese woman. The hardships and the triumphs are all desplayed. The detail to which Pruitt describes China and the life of Ning Lao T'ai-'ai are amazing
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