by Xiaolu Guo
First published 2017
Xiaolu Guo holds her newborn daughter in a London maternity ward, surrounded by women from across the globe. This moment triggers memories of her own extraordinary path from rural China to Europe. Her story begins in a fishing village shack on the East China Sea, where illiterate grandparents shaped her early years. She moves through a transforming Beijing of the eighties and nineties, where underground artists flourished despite mass censorship and Western visitors offered fleeting connections before vanishing home. The Cultural Revolution's impact on families becomes clear as economic ambitions reshape the country around her. Guo's curiosity about the world beyond China's borders eventually drives her to Europe, where she spends fifteen years building a new life. Her perspective as both outsider and insider illuminates the tension between belonging and displacement. Through concrete details of places and people, she traces how a creative spirit emerges from restriction and how one generation raises the next to navigate a connected world.
Genres: autobiography, biography-memoir, 21st-century, cultural-studies
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, found-family
Setting: Beijing, China, East China Sea, Europe, London
Period: 1980s, 1990s, Cultural Revolution
367 pages · Hardcover · Grove Press