emergencily's reviews
97 reviews

"You give them history, temples, pagodas, traditional dance, floating markets, seafood curry, tapioca desserts, silk-weaving cooperatives, but all they really want is to ride some hulking gray beast like a bunch of wildmen and to pant over girls and to lie there half-dead getting skin cancer on the beach during the time in between."

• really interesting to read about the experiences of chinese miners & railroad workers who came to North America
• themes of being the "perpetual foreigner," the threatening "yellow peril," of being written out of the history for so long despite the blood and sweat that went into building key early infrastructure for "western civilization" to "tame" the frontiers. black indigenous and chinese labourers in the mines and railroads were underpaid and exploited and multiple exclusionary legislation were passed
• really liked how much the book talked about the natural world and how important it is to respect our connection to the lands we live on and how the land is a part of us too. how wrong it is that we exploit and extract all the resources until nothing is left. the emphasis on wildness & nature in this book is very special
• interesting look at the connections & relationship btwn chinese migrant labourers & indigenous peoples of america; at times contentious, at times in proximity
• themes of gender nonconformity & transness

• Definitely a page-turner, I finished fast wanting to know what was coming next
• An epic historical fiction & drama with some fantasy & spiritual elements. Set in ancient China during Mongol rule & budding Han Chinese resistance against foreign rule & occupation
• All the deliciously dramatic elements of futile war, being haunted by ancestral ghosts, backstabbing your sworn brothers, corruption in Buddhism, and power struggles
• Such interesting representation of gender, transness and sexuality in ancient times, with a language and understanding so different from our time. Absolute gender fuckery
• Lesbian fisting scene A+

• in retrospect, uncanny clairvoyance to the COVID pandemic
• a humorous, satirical and dark commentary on the machine of capitalism spinning its wheels endlessly and futilely even while a global pandemic sets the world on fire. the wheels on the bus go round and round while the bus drives off a bridge into a canyon
• diaspora growing pains
• the complicated memory of our parents & the weight of their sacrifice
• every time she reminisced about her parents i felt my throat closing up and tears in my eyes

• really interesting look into the lives of migrant worker women in china and the chinese factory labour & economic boom in the 90's and 2000's. incredible to hear about their experiences from the mouths of the girls themselves via interviews
• note that here, "migrant worker" refers to chinese ppl moving from rural towns and villages to the city for work; actually this phenomenon is one of the largest noted human migrations in history
•  since it was published in 2008, it's already long out of date with today's china, where things change and march forward at light speed
• sometimes the author's own political convictions were irritating LOL

• i always enjoy a short story collection that cleverly and subtly weaves connections between narratives that at first seem disparate
• but this was largely boring and didn't really hit any memorable highs for me
• rich & vivid descriptions of its setting are a plus