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Stories that span two rivers, two continents, and two cultures
WANG PING was born in China and came to the United States in 1986. Her publications of poetry and prose include Aching for Beauty, The Magic Whip, and The Last Communist Virgin. She won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities and the Minnesota Book Award and is the recipient of an NEA grant, the Bush Artist Fellowship for poetry, the McKnight Fellowship for nonfiction, and many other honors. She is a professor of English at Macalester College.
Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi is
free-wheeling, unusual, and always charged as it swings back and
forth in time and cultures. These are mountain and river tales
wound together like eels navigating the muddy waters of political,
cultural, and personal displacement and wars waged against the
human spirit. Episodes wriggle between cities on either side of the
Pacific, China to the United States and back again, from Tiger
Leaping Gorge to New York, to Tibet, to the Yangtze and the
Mississippi. Between the trapped and the free as the writer swims
between homes and two rivers simultaneously.
*Gretel Ehrlich*
A wry, distinctive voice animates Wang Ping’s stories. She melds
the autobiographical with the informative and comes up with a
unified hybrid. . . . She portrays her family members and neighbors
as vividly as Charles Dickens. . . . In one story, she discovers
that a girl in the neighborhood had spent the cold night out of
doors, reading Hans Christian Andersen disguised by the cover of
Chairman Mao’s collected sayings. Typical of Ping’s lyrical
sensibility, one registers this as a reflection of the revolution’s
tyranny, yet one is also shown a fittingly fable-like image of the
girl seated beneath a streetlight, ‘her hair and shoulders covered
with frost.’ Perhaps most astonishing was Ping’s ‘Chinese Toilet,’
in which appear latrines, cuspidors, porcelain chamber pots and,
luxury of luxuries, the private toilet. How many writers have the
skill to take a potentially distasteful subject and turn it into an
intelligent, engaging, and sometimes riotous study of an entire
culture in the midst of upheaval? This writer can—with great
success.
*author of My Avant-Garde Education: A Memoir*
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