As a bright young woman, a child of two educated parents, and oldest of four children, she is sent off to work as a laborer on a farm, called Red Fire Farm, near the East China Sea, where thousands of young people from the cities were sent to produce food in nothing more than slave camps, under the auspices of the Communist ideal.
This book achieved exactly that, and I only wish that there were more like it.
My concerns lie outside the realm of political machinations.
You are out on the street.
I am curious about what happened to the author's siblings or her parents and about how she managed to leave China.
Finally, I must give special mention to Min's prose, short and sweetly staccato and ripe with metaphors that my mind, subsumed as it is in European and American literature, rarely encounters.