I always feel suspicious of books that contain such sentences as----"The cook poured my second cup of coffee. I had never been able to get him to leave the coffee pot on the table. He seemed to feel that would lessen his dignity." The reason for my hesitation is the slightly wry humor aimed at someone the speaker might have asked, but didn't. However, on finishing OLD MADAM YIN, I have to conclude that it has some excellent points. I chose to read it thinking that it was an autobiography or an edited life story by an anthropologist. No, it is more the story of contact between an American hospital worker in pre-revolutionary China and a Chinese woman from an upper class family of the old school, Old Madam Yin. The Chinese lady has no voice, the whole book being the summary of Ida Pruitt's observations. As she, the author, spoke Chinese and knew China well, we find an interesting picture of a certain style of life, the manners and innuendoes of a bygone age in Beijing, family dynamics before Mao. It makes for fascinating reading, a useful source of social history, and is a book which makes you ponder how much of Chinese culture survives into the present even if somewhat overshadowed by the decaying but still-powerful Communist Party, the Internet, vast movements of labor, the cementing over of vast areas, in a noisier age of nightclubs and cars. I would guess a lot does survive. It seems to me that a reader who wants to know what Chinese think would be wiser to look elsewhere, but if you are looking for acute observations by an old-style American lady, this is definitely the book. At 129 pages of non-academic prose, you can read OLD MADAM YIN quickly, but the atmosphere will remain with you for a long time.

This book is a personal account of friendship that developed between an American woman raised and working in China and a Chinese woman raised in the pre-cultural revolution period. Madame Yin is a strong, intelligent person who is an individual of her time. Ida describes Madame Yin with a great respect and love as well as the curiousity of one culture for another. I came away from the book with a much greater appreciation for Chinese family values and traditions. This is a quick but very informative read. Ida writes in he first person narrative and, although her writing is only occasionally stilted (a product of its time as well), she is an excellent story teller.

Having read a lot of texts translated from Chinese lately for class, I have to say that this is one of the poorest jobs of translating I have ever encountered. Translating from Chinese to English is not an easy job, granted, because Chinese text is pictographic and requires a lot of artistic elaboration on the part of the author to keep the text alive for a Western audience. "A Daughter of Han" is a complete failure in this respect. As a reader, I felt so far removed from the events of the story, it was as though I was hearing an account of the plot from a woman who knew another guy who'd once heard about this lady who'd had these things happen to her that might be interesting if only the storytelling weren't so detached. I suppose one could make an argument that the emotional detachment with which the author treats potentially very dramatic events makes a larger statement about the Chinese culture, but that still doesn't make it worth reading for 250 pages. I could've gotten the same enthusiasm and emotional detachment from the blurb on the back of the book, had I only known better. Plus, if a key point of the book was this unusual treatment of tone, there are definitely tons of books out there that exemplify exactly how to do this without losing the reader, such as "The Stranger." Anyway, I'll wrap this up so as not to be as thoroughly terrible as the book. Bottom line, this book is boring. If you want to find out about how the common people of China lived around the turn of the 20th century, get a good textbook, look up the time period in the index, and read the obligatory social history section. It'll be about a page long. Amen to that.

I had to read this book for a core class in college and I thought that I would have hated it. Actually, I really liked it. It told of a Chinese working woman's life. It even gives the reader an insight into her lifestyle and her struggles during this tumuluous time in history. The story even touches on the japanese invasion. I didn't think this biography would be interesting but it was. I would recommended this book to anyone. It is a light read and it is very interesting.

Ida Pruitt's biography of Ning Lao T'ai-t'ai (literally "old lady Ning"), a peasant woman of northeast China born in 1867, is a fascinating anecdotal retelling of Ning's personal history as she related it to the author over the course of their two year long friendship. The storyline of Ning's life: childhood, marriage, work, and children, is laid out in a chronological history, broken into separate sections at particular turning points; and yet a cohesive theme of hardship, oppression and poverty, of strong-willed women and weak men is carried throughout not only Ning's tales but also through the stories she relates of her ancestors and neighbors.

Pruitt writes in the voice of Ning as if she is translating, but what she is really doing is recalling Ning's stories of her life in the first half of the 20th century. Ning was born into an educated middle class family which had fallen on harder times. Her father wants a better situation for her marriage, but the older husband he choses for her becomes addicted to opium driving the family into poverty. To survive and feed her children Ning must become first a beggar, then a servant to various households: military, Muslim, bureaucrat, and finally to Christian missionaries. And Ning's voice does come across clearly; speaking against concubinage and prostitution, about the penury of employers, the need to support and keep family together.

By using a first person retelling of the stories Pruitt gives the impresssion of accuracy, yet there were 7 years between the conversations with Ning and the writing of the book. Also the apparent bias against Japanese in prologue and last chapter together with the pub. date of the book indicate a hidden agenda on the part of the author. Still, although limited to the view of this one woman's experience, Ning's story is reflective of the hardships of life for Chinese women before the Communist era.