 "A rare look at life at the turn of the century in China" | 2006-12-07 |
| - Reviewed By aquinas1974 |
| China always seems to have a veil of mystery around it. This book give a rare glimpse of life at the turn of the 19th century as the empire was dying and the nationalists and communists were gearing up for battle. I read this book for a class on Chinese women and absolutely loved it. I will always remember the part of having her feet bound and how her mother would lay on her legs at night so that she could sleep. Unfortunately I lost the book after many years. It wasn't until now, as I was conducting inventory of our biography collection at the library where I work, that I came across the sequal to this book. For those who could not get enough of Lao Tai-tai, there is a second book by Ida Pruitt titled "Old Madam Yin: a memoir of Peking life 1926-1938." The copyright date is 1979. The Daughter of Han is now a wealthy widow struggling to adapt to the new order. If you can't find it on amazon you can always Inter-library loan the book, I know there's at least one library in the midwest that has it ;). |
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| "Superb documentation of a Chinese working woman" | 2006-01-19 |
| - Reviewed By npine111 |
| This riveting book details an area of Chinese life seldom touched by written records. The remarkable friendship between Ida Pruitt and Ning Lao Toai-Toai has led to this very readable, and beautifully textured description of Ning Lao Toai-Toai's life in the late 19th and early 20th century. I found it both an enjoyable read and a valuable source of information about my research related to Chinese family life. |
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| "A Slice of Life" | 2004-02-08 |
| - Reviewed By daitokuji31 |
| Unlike a certain person who reviewed this book, and disliked the plebian tone so much that it caused him sickness, I enjoyed this book a great deal. This book, obviously, is an oral history told by Ning Lao T'ai-ta'i to the American Ida Pruitt in which Mrs. Ning tells her captivated audience about her life from around her birth in 1867 to 1938 when Pruitt was forced to leave Beijing when the Japanese invaded. This book is part history and part folklore. Mrs. Ning gives the reader a great deal of information about the life of a peasant woman living in a time of poverty and opium addiction. She tells of marriage, death, and customs of the rural Chinese and gives in minute detail the structure of compound houses, the daily life of women, and the trying times of living with an opium addict. She also details working not only for Mandarin aristocrats, but also working for Missionaries. Great book. |
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 "I Really Liked this book!" | 2003-05-17 |
| - Reviewed By ml320chula |
| 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. |
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| "life of one Chinese woman" | 2002-08-22 |
| - Reviewed By cuppachai |
| 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. |
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 "This book compelled me to dry-heave more than once" | 2001-11-19 |
| - Reviewed By Anonymous |
| 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. |
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| "A wonderful book" | 2000-04-19 |
| - Reviewed By Anonymous |
| 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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