Clouds and Rain: A China-To-America Memoir

By Edna Wu

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1879260220
• ISBN13: 9781879260221
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Evanston Pub
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.5" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

A Chinese Woman's Metamorphosis Through Cultural Conflict

Recently recommended by a friend, I obtained a copy of Edna Wu's novel, Clouds & Rain: A China-to-America Memoir. I think my friend is right when she told me that this novel is a masterpiece on its own and one should grab a copy before this out-of-print, rare book disappears from the public shelf. It will be invaluable someday. Once I started reading the book I could not put it down. Then I reread it slowly chapter by chapter. It contains five chapters, totaling 224 pages. The first chapter "Searching for the Music of the Soul" frames the amorous encounter of two professors on a California campus. It is deeply psychological and thrills my heart in the vortex of self-contradictions of the protagonist concerning a woman's quest for friendship, love, and self-identity. The second chapter "On the Wings" registers the narrator's first quixotic but promising adventures in America. The third chapter "An Ugly Duckling's Swan Song" captures her culture shocks, agonies and setbacks on American campuses as a graduate student and her rebellious childhood in China with her father as a figure of communist authority and traditional patriarchy. In the fourth chapter "Sex =/=Love?" the protagonist Yun, a female Don Juan, embarks on the road to spiritual liberation through the separation of sex from love. In the final chapter "A Separate Utopia", Yun has gone through purgation in the hell of East-West value conflicts. Does she find a utopia of her own? Jonathan Spence, Sterling Professor of Yale University, commends the book, stating that "[b]y focusing on the narrator's self-absorbed quest for erotic and intellectual fulfillment, Edna Wu's "memoir" offers a new slant to the currently urgent question of how the latest generation of Chinese immigrants can find home in America. One can read this breathless work as a modern-day update of Ding Ling's celebrated Dairy of Miss Sophie." Edna Wu's book was written published in 1994. Compared with Wei Hui's novel A Shanghai Baby, we can see that Edna Wu's book sheds some insight into the changes in China under Western influence. To some extent, Yun sees herself as the embodiment of China. through intense conflicts, Yun/China achieves her metamorphosis. Wu writes: "Recently I have discovered myself to be a pansexual maniac. I can hear sexual utterance in most decent music, I can see sex in well-clothed paintings, I can feel any dance, like the modern Tango, with its whirlpool-like bed rhythm. That is why I cannot go back to China any more. I love America as the cradle of pansexualism--sexualizing arts, philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, mathematics, physics, war, peace, food, defecation... The Chinese on the mainland are still in their infancy as far as true sex is concerned. I shut my eyes and can now see China, a female body tied with her limbs to the four corners of the earth, being pumped almost too vigorously by an extra-large Western [...] She groans with pain and with pleasure. She is simula