Word: ginger
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Anchee Min, author of the critically acclaimed historical novel Becoming Madame Mao, blatantly inserts all these elements in her latest offering, Wild Ginger (Houghton Mifflin; 217 pages). Min suffered a tumultuous childhood in China, finally escaping to the U.S., where she wrote a best-selling memoir. Novels like Wild Ginger are celebrated for their gripping historical accounts, but one suspects their success in the West is due in larger part to the authors' own sensational life stories. The book-jacket bios themselves play at the American immigrant fantasy: an attractive woman warrior babe escapes tyrannical regime, washes...
...Wild Ginger, Min's protagonist, has been marked out as a potential subversive since birth. She has exotic yellow-green eyes, a reflection of her mixed parentage (European father, Chinese mother). She starts off as a spunky little rebel, bravely rescuing the narrator, Maple, from the beatings of the schoolyard bully, Red Pepper. However, her need for acceptance makes her susceptible to brainwashing, and Wild Ginger becomes a Maoist hero (for foiling a burglary at a factory) and later develops into a communist demagogue. Her loyalty to the Red Machine requires her to repress her sexual yearnings for the resident...
...suppose I was asked to review this book because I am a Chinese novelist. But the Chinese women in Wild Ginger and all the other books in the Chinese Chick genre strike me as completely removed from the experience of the contemporary Asian woman. In the novel, Wild Ginger is regularly beaten with belt buckles and has to wrestle with big issues like the struggle for political liberty and the freedom to love. Quite honestly, the major issues I've had to struggle with the past month were a) how to lose weight, b) how to remember where...
...Prepublication reviews have lavished praised on Wild Ginger for being "true-to-life." Too often, however, this true-to-life Asian woman found the characters speaking not in realistic dialogue but in political diatribe. Take Wild Ginger's argument with her mother, in which she lambastes her father: "He was a spy. Spying was his job. He was sent by the Western imperialists. Helping China thrive was his disguise. It was false. Helping the Western imperialists to exploit China was the truth...
...Sangria (glass $5, pitcher $19), vodka-blackberry lime rickey ($6) and—if things aren’t going too well—a “Dark and Stormy” ($5.25), an appealingly brooding combination of Gosling’s rum and ginger beer. A few of those could certainly work well with the “where the hell am I?” feel of the entire place...