The Story about Ping by Marjorie FlackMy review
rating: 4 of 5 starsI have especially fond memories of this book. I just felt like I was there, on the river.
Re-reading it this week brought to mind sadness at how quickly the planet can be changed by people. The Yangtze river way of life is quite different than it was 70 years ago when this book was written. (And perhaps Flack didn't have it exactly right; she's not Chinese, after all.) But certainly things have changed. In the 30 years since I became acquainted with the book, the Yangtze Valley has lost 140 villages, 1,600 factories and over 80,000 acres of growable land, and one species of dolphin to the Three Gorges Dam. That's unfathomable.
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1 comment:
Sally, I was read "Ping" when I was a primary grade child. I've seen pictures of modern times of rural areas in China where a young teenage girl is leading a row of ducks down a road. I felt transported to that children's book and time by that picture. I too am saddened by the Three Gorges Dam and the loss of the cities, and how it has profoundly impacted so many people's lives.
There is a movie out there called "Balzac and the Little Seamstress", a Chinese film about two college boys in the early 1970's during Mao's Cultural Revolution, who were sent to a rural mountain mining village to be laborers and be stripped of their Western style learning etc. The Three Gorges are the main backdrop for the setting. It's truly breathtaking. And a movie with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, about a British doctor and his wife who go to rural China at the turn of the twentieth century and end up battling a cholera epidemic, also takes place along the Yangtze.
When I was in Junior High, I discovered Pearl Buck's writings. I was fascinated. She grew up in China, the daughter of missionary parents, and lived over their even in some of her adult years. I've always wondered if the author of "Ping" didn't spend a part of her life (childhood?, adulthood?)in China, because she has such a "perfect" sense of it. (Sorry I go on so.)
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