Throwaway Daughter

Download or read book Throwaway Daughter written by Ting-Xing Ye and published by Tundra Books. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Canadian teenager travels to China to explore her ancestry and search for her birth mother in a dramatic and moving YA novel. Throwaway Daughter tells the story of Grace Dong-mei Parker, whose biggest concern is how to distill her adoption from China into the neat blanks of her personal history assignment. Aside from the unwelcome reminders of difference, Grace loves passing for the typical Canadian teen — until the day she witnesses the Tiananmen massacre on the news. Horrified, she sets out to explore her Chinese ancestry, only to discover that she was one of the thousands of infant girls abandoned in China since the introduction of the one-child policy, strictly enforced by the Communist government. But Grace was one of the lucky ones, adopted as a baby by a loving Canadian couple. With the encouragement of her adoptive parents, she studies Chinese and travels back to China in search of her birth mother. She manages to locate the village where she was born, but at first no one is willing to help her. However, Grace never gives up and, finally, she is reunited with her birth mother, discovering through this emotional bond the truth of what happened to her almost twenty years before.

Download or read book A Leaf In The Bitter Wind written by Ting-Xing Ye and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 1998-03-16 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the best ways to understand history is through eye-witness accounts. Ting-Xing Ye’s riveting first book, A Leaf in the Bitter Wind, is a memoir of growing up in Maoist China. It was an astonishing coming of age through the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1974). In the wave of revolutionary fervour, peasants neglected their crops, exacerbating the widespread hunger. While Ting-Xing was a young girl in Shanghai, her father’s rubber factory was expropriated by the state, and he was demoted to a labourer. A botched operation left him paralyzed from the waist down, and his health deteriorated rapidly since a capitalist’s well-being was not a priority. He died soon after, and then Ting-Xing watched her mother’s struggle with poverty end in stomach cancer. By the time she was thirteen, Ting-Xing Ye was an orphan, entrusted with her brothers and sisters to her Great-Aunt, and on welfare. Still, the Red Guards punished the children for being born into the capitalist class. Schools were being closed; suicide was rampant; factories were abandoned for ideology; distrust of friends and neighbours flourished. Ting-Xing was sent to work on a distant northern prison farm at sixteen, and survived six years of backbreaking labour and severe conditions. She was mentally tortured for weeks until she agreed to sign a false statement accusing friends of anti-state activities. Somehow finding the time to teach herself English, often by listening to the radio, she finally made it to Beijing University in 1974 as the Revolution was on the wane — though the acquisition of knowledge was still frowned upon as a bourgeois desire and study was discouraged. Readers have been stunned and moved by this simply narrated personal account of a 1984-style ideology-gone-mad, where any behaviour deemed to be bourgeois was persecuted with the ferocity and illogic of a witch trial, and where a change in politics could switch right to wrong in a moment. The story of both a nation and an individual, the book spans a heady 35 years of Ye’s life in China, until her eventual defection to Canada in 1987 — and the wonderful beginning of a romance with Canadian author William Bell. The book was published in 1997. The 1990s saw the publication of several memoirs by Chinese now settled in North America. Ye’s was not the first, yet earned a distinguished place as one of the most powerful, and the only such memoir written from Canada. It is the inspiring story of a woman refusing to “drift with the stream” and fighting her way through an impossible, unjust system. This compelling, heart-wrenching story has been published in Germany, Japan, the US, UK and Australia, where it went straight to #1 on the bestseller list and has been reprinted several times; Dutch, French and Turkish editions will appear in 2001.

Download or read book Throwaway Girls written by Andrea Contos and published by Kids Can Press Ltd. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely edge-of-your-seat thriller from a debut writer to watch. Caroline is only three months from her great escape — leaving behind her rigid prep school and the parents who think they can convert her to being straight — when her best friend, Madison, goes missing. There’s no question that Caroline will get involved in the investigation. After all, she has her own reasons for not trusting the police, and she owes Madison big time. But Caroline uncovers a wider mystery as she follows the clues, with other missing girls and no one on the case. Why isn’t anyone looking for these girls? And what’s the connection between them and Madison? Could it be . . . Caroline herself?

Download or read book Forbidden City written by William Bell and published by Seal Books. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventeen-year-old Alex Jackson comes home from school to find that his father, a CBC news cameraman, wants to take him to China's capital, Beijing. Once there, Alex finds himself on his own in Tian An Men Square as desperate students fight the Chinese army for their freedom. Separated from his father and carrying illegal videotapes, Alex must trust the students to help him escape. Closely based on eyewitness accounts of the massacre in Beijing, Forbidden City is a powerful and frightening story.

Download or read book The Courtesan's Daughter written by Claudia Dain and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her prospects for finding a suitable match limited by her mother's infamous past as one of London's most sought-after courtesans, Lady Caroline is dismayed to discover that her mother plans to purchase a husband for her by agreeing to settle the Earl of Ashdon's gambling debts in exchange for marriage. Original.

Download or read book My Mother's Daughter written by Perdita Felicien and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A phenomenal, human story. . . . I could not put this book down." —CLARA HUGHES An instant national bestseller, this raw and affecting memoir is the story of a mother and daughter who beat the odds together. Decades before Perdita Felicien became a World Champion hurdler running the biggest race of her life at the 2004 Olympics, she carried more than a nation's hopes—she carried her mother Catherine's dreams. In 1974, Catherine is determined and tenacious, but she's also pregnant with her second child and just scraping by in St. Lucia. When she meets a wealthy white Canadian family vacationing on the island, she knows it's her chance. They ask her to come to Canada to be their nanny—and she accepts. This was the beginning of Catherine's new life: a life of opportunity, but also suffering. Within a few years, she would find herself pregnant a third time—this time in her new country with no family to support her, and this time, with Perdita. Together, in the years to come, mother and daughter would experience racism, domestic abuse, and even homelessness, but Catherine's will would always pull them through. As Perdita grew and began to discover her preternatural athletic gifts, she was edged onward by her mother's love, grit, and faith. Facing literal and figurative hurdles, she learned to leap and pick herself back up when she stumbled. This book is a daughter's memoir—a book about the power of a parent's love to transform their child's life.

Download or read book To Throw Away Unopened written by Viv Albertine and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS 2018 What was I fighting for? Even now I'm not sure. Something so old and so deep, it has no words, no shape, no logic. Every memoir is a battle between reality and invention - but in her follow up to Clothes, Music, Boys, Viv Albertine has reinvented the genre with her unflinching honesty. To Throw Away Unopened is a fearless dissection of one woman's obsession with the truth - the truth about family, power, and her identity as a rebel and outsider. It is a gaping wound of a book, both an exercise in blood-letting and psychological archaeology, excavating what lies beneath: the fear, the loneliness, the anger. It is a brutal expose of human dysfunctionality, the impossibility of true intimacy, and the damage wrought upon us by secrets and revelations, siblings and parents. Yet it is also a testament to how we can rebuild ourselves and come to face the world again. It is a portrait of the love stories that constitute a life, often bringing as much pain as joy. With the inimitable blend of humour, vulnerability, and intelligence that makes Viv Albertine one of our finest authors working today, To Throw Away Unopened smashes through layers of propriety and leads us into a new place of savage self-discovery.