5 comments about Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid.

1. Once you start this book, Evelyn becomes you. I had to just keep reading and reading...to finish it, desperate for a happy ending. It is the TRUE diary of a young girl - dabbling in prositution, drugs, therapy and homelessness. This book offers great insight in to the mind of a adolesent, and reminds one of a not so distant past of battling the same demons. Evelyn's world view is set to critique all that crosses her path...including our correctional services, family services, and basic social acceptability. Pretty smart for a 15 year old. Many wonderful thoughts, feelings and ideas can be gained from reading this book. I would recommend this book as required reading for youths who typically DON'T read. Its a great starting point and is sure to capture their attention. But nonetheless...a great story that in the end, any reader feels privilaged to have been on the journey.



2. This is a document Evelyn kept from a remarkable phase of her life as a drug addict and prostitute on the streets of Vancouver, and a teenage and ethnic one at that. It shows some of her survival instincts which exist within her and which fight to keep her alive through it all. However, as I read on, I found myself having less and less respect for her. It went from respect for a person who fought to get out of circumstances in life she couldn't stand - not that it was horrid or anything, just not to her liking - to thinking how pathetic she was to have just wanted the change and then making herself out to be a victim of everything. I don't believe she owns up to much, or if she did, it was all "talk", cause her actions didn't back it up. By the end, she came across as a spineless jellyfish with the survival instincts of one to fight and survive whenever it happened, but her life became meaningless without the adversity that gave it a purpose to survive. She can't be happy as a "normal" person without death half staring her in the face or walking closely behind, but is a victim otherwise cause it's stalking her so closely. Interesting insight into her life, yes, but it became difficult to read without judgment, and turns monotonous of the same "routine" after a while. Better than the average book, sure, but not sure by how much. Thus the 4 stars.



3. Before reading this I had high expectations of it. After reading it, mostly in between classes, I'm sadly disappointed. If you're a fan of Lau's poetry you may gain some insight into them through this journal.
   Honest? Yes. Brutally frank? I don't think so. Like others have said: rather than an account of struggle and hardship, all we have here is a bored teenager who did a 2-year stint as a street worker.
   I also question her reason for running away. Sure, overbearing ethnic parents can be stifling and problematic when you've grown up in a western world with (somewhat) different values and ideals to those of your parents. Fair enough, they locked her in her room most of the time and forced her to study; but is that really that bad? It wasn't like they were feeding her a diet consisting of only two-minute noodles and only letting her out to have showers.



4. This is a very tiresome and tedious book about a girl named Evelyn who ran away from home at the age of 14 because her mother yelled a lot and her father was out of work most of the time. Sadly there are millions of young people in this same situation but they don't exchange an unhappy home life for the mean, homeless streets.The author devotes page after page of an endless and futile merry-go- round of prostitution and then seeking solace through drugs. She "hooks" up with this lowlife loser named Larry who she thinks is a "nice guy" because he readily supplies her with Valium, Alcohol,Mandrax, Methadone and LSD.Evelyn tries valiantly to live up to her self created image of a tortured artist because of her scribblings in her journal but all we are left with is 276 pages of 'Poor Me" and self inflicted suffering and self pity.



5. I've read a good many non-fiction-autobiographies. This book is the most viscerial yet cerebral, poignant, vulnerably heart-wretching; Honest, courageous mind boggling work of artistic genius, I have ever come across.
   
   A sheer out & out mind-bender. A work of transcendent catharsis & tragic emotional metamorphosis, from a phenomenal brilliant writer.
   
   After assimilating Ms. Lau's enthralling, somewhat beguiling stylism, one is simply left, torn asunder, as her spellbinding beautific word pictures are rendered in such astute & sultry erudition.
   
   Evelyn Lau's comprehensive body of work is entrancingly seductive.Hauntingly beautiful & adoit; Scintillating,yet melancholy.Enigmatic & stupefying.Ultimately, I am left dumbstruck.
   
   Her writing has an innate ability to create an obsession & infatuation in a reader,that melts away any notion of steel remnant cold calculated logic, that men may attempt to employ toward women.The games over...
   
   On the meridian of art in written form, we find the pleatau of spirit; Immortal soul, eternal love...embodied within Evelyn Lau's art.
   
   Once you have read her work, your life absolutely, will never be the same again...

No comments about Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution.

No comments about Amy Tan (Asian Americans of Achievement).

No comments about Maya Lin (Americans of character).

No comments about I. M. Pei (Asian-American Biographies).

No comments about Yo-Yo Ma (Asian-American Biographies).

No comments about Confucio (Grandes biografias series).

2 comments about Chinese American Portraits: Personal Histories, 1828-1988.

1. I bought this for my wife. She did not read it but I have. The portraits are of people with different experiences. It's a good read.



2. These are the first-person stories of some fifteen ordinary families - some composed by the subjects and some generated as oral histories - together with oodles of family photos - some in Old World regalia, some in tee-shirts and cut-offs; a cowboy, a NASCAR driver, a decorated Veteran, a Louisiana sheriff, a ballerina, an artist in his studio, a multi-millionaire real estate magnate with her bare feet up on her desk. They, like you and I, are all immigrants or the descendents of immigrants. In this album, the immigrants are Chinese.
   
   In the current malodorous sump of American politics, where Screaming Heads on TV have more influence than face-to-face time with neighbors or books, certain demagogues have done their utmost to foment fear of immigration and loathing of immigrant groups who bring different religious cultures. The Chinese were subject to just such virulent racism during the last decades of the 19th Century. A national law was passed, by the Congress of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, to exclude the Chinese from immigration. They were branded as unassimilable, in large part because of their religion, or lack of a proper religion from a WASP perspective. They were called morally degenerate, phsyically unappealing, unsanitary, and over-sexed. It was a felony in many states for a "white" person to marry one. Certain writers, including Madison Grant, warned that they would outbreed the "great race" of Northern Europeans, that they had aspirations in fact to do so and to dominate the world.
   
   One chapter in this book, concerning several generations of the Wong Family in Albert Lea, Minnesota, has powerful personal meaning to me. I was born on a farm near Albert Lea. My father was an immigrant and my mother's family were "old world" in all but clothing. There was one Chinese restaurant in the whole county, owned by the one Chinese family in Albert Lea, the Wongs. My mother went to high school with a Wong girl. I'd like to brag that they were friends, but the Wongs of her generation don't remember having friends until they moved away to Chicago and New York. One of the Wong girls married a Haitian in New York, becoming Eleanor Wong Telemaque, a writer. Shawn Wong also became a writer and a race-car driver. Eleanor's daughter Adrienne became a ballerina and married Philip Nash, of Irish and Japanese descent. I'm afraid my mother and her siblings lost a huge opportunity; the Wongs were probably the most interesting neighbors they had in Albert Lea, Minnesota in the 1930s.

1 comments about Maya Lin (Contemporary Biographies).

1. Basic information on Lin's life is there, and some art terms and other words are defined in the text and in a glossary. But the book begins at the peak of excitement ("She won!") and immediately falls into a description of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition that fails to hold interest or build a strong storyline. Ling provides good context for Maya's work with information about her family and childhood, but the complete lack of family photos is surprising. For instance, a discussion of Henry Lin's ceramic artwork is illustrated with a generic photograph of an unidentified artist.

   One mistake: Maya graduated from Athens High School in June,1977.

No comments about Ezra Pound's Chinese Friends: Stories in Letters.