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Yeh Yeh's House: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Evelina Chao
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 262633
Media: Paperback
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0312330782
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9780312330781
ASIN: 0312330782
Publication Date: February 21, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: The book is clean but may have highlights.
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Product Description
Growing up Chinese in Virginia in the Fifties, Evelina Chao's sense of historical or cultural context was colored by the images contained in her grandfather Yeh-Yeh's letters and news of his life as an eminent poet, philosopher, and theologian in Beijing. Her geologist father and biologist mother suffered a kind of cultural dyslexia in the American South, having fled Beijing after the Maoist Revolution in 1949. The young Evelina, foreign and isolated, believed that in China she would find the meaning of her life.
And then she found music. The rigors of training to become a professional classical musician seduced her into thinking she no longer required Yeh-Yeh's benediction, that her Chinese heritage was secondary. When Yeh-Yeh died at 92, she realized that her mythical notions of China had died with him. All that reminded her were her uncles and aunts who still lived in the family house in Beijing.
Accompanied by her mother, acting as her interpreter and all-around passport, she traveled to Beijing when China was undergoing rapid transformation following the Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s, two years before the Tiananmen uprising. Every trace of old China was being expunged, the ancient neighborhoods plowed under. Yeh-Yeh's House is a voyage of self-discovery and mother-daughter understanding set against the backdrop of a China that no longer exists.
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| Customer Reviews:
An extraordinary family portrait in modern Communist China February 11, 2005
Phil Lee (Minneapolis, Minn, Silicon Tundra, USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Ms Chao, a St Paul, Minn artist and first generation Chinese American, writes a personal travelog about seeking her roots. She portrays a saga with extraordinary sensitivity and cultural transparency. Common with the demands of establishing her professional and family life, she indeterminably delays the plaintive urging of her paternal grandfather (Yeh Yeh) to come and visit him in Beijing before it is too late (p6, 22). Her wryly, humorous writing style makes this an enjoyable read and for Sinophiles there are many topics in each chapter to chuckle and reflect on cultural differences.
She writes about a sojourn of 15 years ago, a 5-week visit with her mother. As with most Americans, she must rely on her to explain and interpret what they see, do and meet. As an added layer of complexity and intrigue, as youngest daughter of three children (p3, 72) she discusses the increasing dichotomy between her and her immigrant thinking parents. During the trip, plans and actions by her mother slowly reveal a newfound awe in her brilliance, cleverness and resourcefulness.
As a then 38 year old, her trip to China (p110) was set in the late 80s, when Deng Xiaoping's Reform and Opening program is in full swing, but before the Tiananmen Square incident in 89 or completion of the Three Gorges Dam. Her book has 26 chapters divided into 2 sections. Her China journey starts on Part II, Chap 10, p103 with a flight to Shanghai. Her book is illustrated with one portrait of her grandfather and a map of the China journey, but no diagram of the family tree, references or index. There is little discussion on the writing of this book, so the artful craft is ultimately up to the reader to judge the intimate thoughts, innate Chinese mannerisms, and veracity of the passages.
Because of her trip's timing to China, the author portrays the hardship and indelible imprint of Mao's China had on her aunts and uncles, cousins and extended family. While personal and intimate, Chao does not mince words in describing the birth of Communist China and how the various epics of the Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward and Reform left their lasting imprint and what it meant to survive. She also clearly and succinctly describes the life and environment of the common people, both their pleasures and their warts.
Part I is a prelude to the actual trip. Sung Lien, her Chinese name given by her grandfather, has been calling for her several times since the 70s. Her grandfather was a famous theologian at Yenching U, Beijing, one of the first Christian missionary schools in China and who was educated at Vanderbilt U in the States. Her grandfather was Dean of Yenching's School of Religion and a top China leader for the World Council of Churches. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard singled out Chao Tzu-ch'en for reform of intellectuals and religion. Reform meant forced public recantation of beliefs, burning of his works, being publically denounced, interrogated, imprisonment and menial labor in service to the new regime. Later the Communist regime takes over Yenching to form the elite Peking University.
Interestingly Chao describes the several visits from the extended family to the US. For example in Chap 3, her paternal aunt visited, just after Yeh Yeh committed suicide during to the Red Guard purge of pro-Western ideology (p77). The visit is a distant, highbrow one as her mother describes her paternal aunt, who is cut in the same cloth of her grandfather. Then her other Beijing paternal uncle and his wife visited her family in the US (Chap 5-7), whom she bonded with and immensely enjoyed. They reinforced that it is in her destiny to visit her grandfather house in China, portending that this trip alone, she will experience profound events that will affect her life immeasurably. Chao always demurs that she has no time and must learn Mandarin first.
The previous nine chapters in Part I set the stage for the trip, in a autobiographical portrait of the author during childhood, school, young adult, and professional life as a musician for a major city orchestra. The author clearly and sensitively portrays the common issues between immigrant and later generations. There is much misunderstanding and resentment that mother and daughter distance themselves as a matter of self-preservation (p100).
Chao finally decides to go to China with her mother in 1984 (p84) just after her Beijing Uncle's visit. Three years later and with three months of Mandarin lessons, they depart in June 1987.
Part II, over the next 180 pgs or 2/3rds of the book, is a personal travelog to visit relatives and mother's friends in Shanghai, Xi'an, Chongqing, Yangtze River trip through the 3 Gorges to Wuhan, Changsha, and finally Beijing. This travelog is unique that it shows how to travel as the natives do and how to circumvent travel issues that come up due to the overburdened transportation systems that existed in this slice in time. It also shows the family life and thought patterns of modern Chinese as they weathered the birth and maturation of the new China State.
It also shows the bewilderment and culture shock that any new visitor to China would experience. Chao's innate sensitivity to her environment, facilitiates her writing to include the thrills and pleasures as well as doubts and misgivings in well crafted elocution. In Shanghai and environs, she visits her maternal aunt and family (Chap11-14); flying to Xi'an, she visits her mother's former classmate, friends and Terra-Cotta warriors (Chap 15-18); flying to Chongqing, she visits with a Director of an actor's troupe and family (Chap 17); set sail thru the famed 3 Gorges (Chap 18); in Wuhan, she visits with former classmate, who gets them train tickets to Changsha; where she visits with her mother's sister and brother and families (Chap 19-20); finally she gets the elusive plane tickets to Beijing to visit her paternal and maternal aunts, uncles and friends, the Great Wall and Forbidden City (Chap 21-25); and finally train tickets back to their Shanghai POE.
 Will's Thoughts on Yeh Yeh's House March 8, 2005
W. Fedkenheuer (Boston, MA USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have just finished this book and it was an absolutely wonderful read, getting me very excited for my own upcoming trip to China and everything that it might hold. Of course for me it will be a completely different experience, I'm a white boy from Canada, however it is a truly wonderful journey she takes us on.
Evelina slowly brings you in to the world of her family and all that encapsulates being a Chinese-American never having visited Yeh Yeh's house in China. Over the journey, she helps you to try and understand the relationships of everyone involved and how being in China transforms her own understanding of her herself. She is such a beautiful writer that you the reader go through this transformation with her, coming out at the end of the book with a new understanding of what it means to connect with your own heritage.
I cannot recommend it enough to anyone, and will treasure it forever on my bookshelf
A subtly moving and honest memoir August 28, 2005
Dan Y. Wang (San Francisco, California United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
On one level this book is a travelogue. The author is one
of many thousands of American tourists visiting China in the late
1980's. She is taken to see the beautiful lakes of Hangzhou,
rides on a boat through the Yangtze's three famous gorges, and
is shown the wonderful troops of clay warriors in the tombs of
Xian, besides visits to the Forbidden City and Tian An Men Square. However, the author's fellow traveller is her mother, who has many
relatives and friends in China. During a good part of their
5 week journey, they are guided by ordinary Chinese citizens
and eat with or stay with them in their homes. As a result, the
author sees the lives of these citizens as few truly foreign tourists
would. Her descriptions of old men with back sores who pull
pedicabs for a living, or the indignities endured by four families
sharing a communal kitchen doubling as a communal toilet, or
of the distant cousin who, having come on a 5-hour train ride,
had to leave on the return trip after only half an hour's visit for
fear of missing the next day's work, serve as a valuable
cultural study of daily life in China in that period.
On another level, this book is the author's exploration of
that part of her identity which is Chinese even though she was
born and bred in the USA. Inextricably interwined with this
exploration is the author's attempt to understand and resolve her uneasy
relationship with her own mother. While they journey together
through Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xian and ChongQing towards Beijing,
where lies her grandfather's house, "Yeh Yeh's House", these
other explorations occur in parallel. We see the author begin to
perceive and appreciate her mother in new ways as her mother reveals
herself more fully in surroundings where she feels truly at home.
Through the connections the author makes with her relatives and their
unconditional acceptance of her in the family, the author
also appears to achieve a better acceptance of her role in her
family's Chinese lineage.
The author is able to capture many poignant episodes with
understatement that is all the more affecting. When she offers
her uncle visiting her in Minnesota spending money, his face
"reflected a clash of spontaneous myriad thoughts", trying to
assess what was proper in their relationship as "uncle and niece,
foreigner and American, poor and rich, man and woman, guest and
hostess." When her female cousin links arms with her in an
off-handed way during a shopping trip, the author writes that she
sees "in her warm brown eyes only simple attention, uncomplicated
by judgment or expectation. In the firm support of her arm
I felt a closeness I had not felt anywhere else, a simple
unspoken intimacy...". In these and other episodes the author
manages to describe the intricacies underlying human relationships
with as much skill and delicacy as in the finest playing
of any Bach sonata.
Bravo!
 Too many life changing epiphanies for a book reluctant to reveal much about the author's life May 5, 2006
Suzanne Amara (MA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
There were parts of this memoir I enjoyed very much---mainly as a travelogue of a trip through China in the 1980s---I liked hearing about the struggles to get train or plane tickets, the cruise on the Ganges, the various relatives of the author and what their homes and meals and lives were like. However, that alone doesn't make a book. This book suffered from being both too much and too little. The too much part was the author's MANY, MANY epiphanies about herself as she traveled with her mother through China. It sometimes seemed like every paragraph ended with Chao realizing another thing about herself, her roots, her feelings about family, her feelings about China....everything she saw or did seemed to trigger a new realization. There was also too much for my particular taste about tennis and music---passions of the author, but not that interesting to read about for those who don't share the passion. The too little part was the background information that would make the visit to China and the relative's visits to the US more meaningful for a reader. I sensed the author didn't want to give away too much about her life or family---which is fine, but not really what makes a good memoir. For example, she mentions a sister, but tells absolutely nothing about her life, which made me wonder why it was the author who was singled out as so important to her grandfather that he left some of his most precious possessions to her and not her sister, or her brother. Her parent's bizarre marriage was visited on, but not really explained, and it was mentioned that the author did not have children, but why this was the case was not revealed---again, an author's right, but in a book about family and its ties, such information would add a lot to making this a meaningful book, and making the author's many realizations mean a little more.
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