A fascinating exploration of alienation within a culture (Communist China) many don't really hear about. Guo finds herself in art and her writing is beautiful even as she discusses the repercussions of sexual assault.

A completely compelling book about finding your home, and all the ways that lead there.
This book is written in a very clean, precise and honest voice, that made me keep turning pages, wanting to continue reading, eager to learn more and discover the next part of the authorship life.
And what a life story it is, with going from a poor little village filled with superstitious and old tales, all the wa to a successful career in Britain,

very interesting and fantastically done,

I did not finish reading this book so unable to review thoroughly..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................

This totally absorbing and compelling memoir is an object lesson in how to write autobiography; clear, concise, honest, and with a narrative pace that keeps the reader eager to continue with the story. And it’s a remarkable life story, from poor beginnings in a remote fishing village in China to film-school in Beijing and a successful career in Britain. Thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating.

Nine Continents is the story of someone struggling to find the place where they belong. Xiaolu always longed for a place to call home. She was raised until she was seven by her grandparents in a village steeped in tradition and drowning in old wives tales. Fear abounded, and the villagers dined on gossip, which was easier, at times, to find then food. Xiaolu brings to life her memories of growing up in what she termed a village from the Qing dynasty, struggling to find a place in the current world. Her grandmother, with bound feet and a kind heart, caring for her. Xiaolu, a daughter, born in a place where only sons were considered of any worth, never felt truly accepted, her aging grandmother her dearest friend. As a child, a monk told her fortune - predicting that she was a peasant warrior who would travel the nine continents - meaning that she would travel the world or at least travel all around China. Feeling trapped in the small fishing village, she wondered how could her future hold anything like that.

Finally meeting her brother at seven when her parents come to fetch her, Xiaolu hopes in vain to find acceptance within her nuclear family. Perhaps she could find home here. After struggling and realizing that pleasing her mother was impossible, Xiaolu sought to gain approval at school, gaining recognition through her hard work and through the following of Lei Feng's example. Eventually, her hard word paid off, giving her access to schooling in Beijing and eventually a new life of travelling the nine continents. Finally, this girl, whose bitter life was sustained by consuming iron-rich pigs blood, sees the world of possibilities slowly open before her. Caught in a neverland between the East and the West, where and when will she finally find home?

Xiaolu Guo's memoir is a first-hand account of the bitter alongside the sweet. A victim of sexual and emotional abuse, Xiaolu doesn't mince words or pull punches. She writes about her life in a straightforward, honest way. In addition to her recollections, The Nine Continents is full of intriguing stories, like those told by the old stationmaster of sea bandits and the heroic deeds of her own grandfather, a Hakku fisherman, travelling on the ocean and fighting against pirates and the Japanese soldiers. Culturally rich, Xiaolu weaves folk tales and the beliefs of the village, their worship of the goddess Guanyin and their other superstitious traditions, together with her own tale. Before you read this book, I think you should know that Nine Continents is a bitter tale, for Xiaolu is straightforward about the trials of her life. She writes about her perpetual hopelessness and the many horrible things that happened to her. The majority of the story is quite depressing, and though the cultural tidbits and stories are intriguing, the book has a very dark flavor.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Grove Press for providing a free e-Galley of this book for review. All opinions contained above are my own.

I'm not typically a memoir fan as the story usually suffers from that first person bias that comes with telling your own life events. I picked this book up solely as an amateur historian interested in a first-person account of post-Mao China. I never expected that I would get to read my favorite memoir of the year.

Guo's memoir is a world apart from so many that I have read. It starts slowly and small, as the tale of a young girl abandoned by her parents would. The scenery of each part of her life is vibrant in description but you also feel the stifling, abusive weight of it as she searches more and more for herself. Though the tone is calm, there is a lot of violence in young Xiaolu's life and it ages her soul. It also strengths her inner self.

As you read, your connection to her grows ever stronger through all her struggles. I out loud congratulated the author on her first big success and felt true, sweet joy for her. Many fiction books never get that response for me, let alone a memoir. I have so much respect for this woman, for the life she has led, and I wish her every happiness and success in the future. A tale of resilience and triumph through every struggle, and about being true to yourself.

Abandoned by her parents as a baby, then abandoned again, raised until 12 by her illiterate grandmother in a small fishing village in Southern China. Then reunited with her parents, her mother she describes as cold and unloving beat her for any minor misdemeanour. Her father, who she connected with was an artist, often away or secluded in his studio. A brother who ignored or teased her. Xiaolu found herself eager to change her life and escape her miserable existence. Finally after studying day and night for over a year she was accepted into Beijing Film Academy, 1 of 7, out of thousands that had applied! What an achievement! From there she captured another scholarship and flew to her future home in London. An absolutely amazing book, written with such honesty. I couldn't put it down.

China as seen through the eyes of a young child who manages to succeed with many strikes against her. An important glimpse into China, and later the author shares her life as an immigrant to London

Nine Continents (2017, also published in the UK with the title Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up) is less a memoir than a collection of Guo's personal myths. And it is a book about the transformative nature of art; about art as a means to escape, as something in-between different realities, something true and false at the same time. The author paints herself with the same colours of the orphans who were the protagonists of her favourite novels; like them, she will eventually turn out to be the hero of her own life.

We learn that, immediately after Guo's birth in the early seventies, she was handed over by her biological parents to a peasant couple who lived in the nearby mountains. Two years later, those adopted parents, claiming they couldn’t feed the baby, handed her back to her paternal grandparents. In the fishing village of Shitang (literarily, Stone Pond), in Zhejiang province by the East China Sea, Guo was confronted with the remains of a feudal life style, where women as her grandmother – an unnamed, foot-bound, illiterate woman who had been sold into marriage when she was twelve years old – were regularly beaten by their alcoholic husbands.

Following her grandfather’s suicide, when Guo was almost seven years old, her biological parents came to Shitang to reclaim their daughter. Without much explanation, Guo is then taken by these strangers to live with them. In a communist compound in the industrial inland town of Wenling, Guo was beaten by her mother, ignored and harassed by her older brother and his friends; she was sexually assaulted by one of her father’s colleagues; and she had to undergo an abortion after an affair with one of her teachers.

She had her first opportunity to escape in 1993, when, from 7.000 applicants, she was one of eleven students accepted into Beijing’s Film Academy. her university years were spent in the vigorous scene of Beijing’s artistic vanguard that followed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Guo voraciously reads books and watches movies, she makes friends, she takes lovers – including one violent Chinese man -, she publishes her first books. She takes every chance she was given to educate herself – only to be confronted, after graduation, with constant censorship of her movie scripts.

When Guo wins the Chevening scholarship to study at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, UK, she makes clear to the reader that escaping once again would be the only step to take in these circumstances. She settles in London, she struggles to learn the language, and she finally becomes a successful published author who manages to write originally in English – a borrowed language, like a borrowed identity.

I must confess that, if I had read the paragraphs above, I would hardly have picked up this book. ‘Another misery memoir about the shortcomings of communist China’, I would have thought, ‘a shorter, less ambitious ‘Wild Swans’ for millennials.’ Or, even worse, I would have dismissed it as just another ‘Chinese Cinderella’ story, a self-indulgent memoir of a Chinese woman’s wrenching journey from Eastern hell to rose-tinted Western paradise.

Had I thought so, I would have been wrong. Firstly, because Guo's book is less a memoir than a collection of anecdotes, a collection of 'san wen', small fragmentary stories. Secondly, because, unlike Chang’s memoir, Guo's book has a fable-like quality – as we can infer from the British title ‘Once Upon A Time…’ – and her writing-style is more personal, blunt, rough. Thirdly, and more importantly, because, unlike Adeline Yen Mah’s memoir, Guo's book manages to achieve a solid middle ground between never shying away from brutal facts, while at the same time never lapsing into self-pity.

Furthermore, unlike many memoirs of immigration that boil down to giving the reader a taste for a so-called exotic land while also reaffirming his conviction of so-called Western superiority, Nine Continents/ Once Upon A Time in the East does not romanticize England. Guo escaped state censorship – or self-censorship, the ‘shadow body’ in every Chinese artist -, only to find herself alienated in new ways in the West.

Guo's is not a journey to paradise; in fact, it is not even a journey she has already completed. “It seems to me that people decide to settle somewhere not because they love the place, but because they value and cherish what they have invested in it.” I love the beautiful image at the end of the book, when the author realizes that she has come full-circle, back to the very beginning of this journey: orphan, dislocated, angry. “I was my own home now.” There is no reconciliation, no forgiveness, no Pollyanna-like acceptance of the past. She never stops being a peasant warrior, and I quite like that.

If a reader comes into this book looking for the epic scope or the detachment of Chang’s prose, he will be disappointed. Some of Guo's small stories are scarcely believable, and we have the feeling that she took the artistic licence to fill in the gaps between what she remembered and what her five-year-old self could never have grasped. At the time I was reading this book, I came upon a poem by American writer Jane Hirshfield, and it resonated with what I was feeling about the story (and about your way of telling it): “Transparent as glass, / the face of the child telling her story. / But how else learn the real, / if not by inventing what might lie outside it?” (‘Glass’, in Come, Thief, 2011). Guo's is, after all, the coming-of-age story of a self-made artist, a portrait of the artist as a young Chinese woman. It is art, and artifice.

The story fragments assume a mythic quality: like the episode when a Taoist monk tells Guo's grandmother that the girl was a peasant warrior set to travel the Nine Continents; or when Guo's father explains to her the meaning of your family name, Guo (“It means ‘outside the first city wall’. In the old days, people built two layers of wall around their cities and Guo is the space between them. An in-between zone. That’s what our name means”); or the episode when Guo, still a young girl in Shitang, meets a group of art students on the beach and marvels at the fact that they can create beauty out of a grey, featureless seascape (“I was suddenly captivated by the girl’s imaginative act: that one could reshape a drab and colourless reality into a luminous world.”). Reshaping is as much what the author does in this book as it is what she has done with her own life.

Unlike Chang’s Wild Swans, Guo's writing is unpolished, ruthless, and openly angry – as if she refused to wear down her voice’s sharp edges into a smooth pebble all too comfortable to the reader’s touch. I was reminded of another poem by Hirshfield: “One angle blunts, another sharpens. / Loss also: stone & knife” (Come, Thief, 2011). Guo's is an all-encompassing anger, pointing East and West, a broken compass. If Xinran Xue were to capture your testimony, Guo's voice would be better fitted to a collection of The Naughty Women of China.
The author is hard-hearted, restless, ambitious; her move to the arts was more than anything fuelled by anger.
Moreover, unlike Chang’s and Xinran’s privileged backgrounds, Guo came from the bottom of the social hierarchy. Illiterate and malnourished until the age of seven, hers is a story of a peasant girl desperate to escape poverty and violence. Furthermore, her family story is one of people who only had the chance to study and rise from the bottom of the social scale through the institutions and incentives of communist government. Guo is thus much more ambivalent about some aspects of China than Chang or Xinran. And she is angrier – as flawed and captivating as the Monkey King in Journey to the West, a classic Chinese novel whose fragments she uses at the beginning of each chapter of her own personal journey to the West.

In fact, the great strength of the book lies in the fact that Guo manages to retain that ambivalence, never simplifying her conflicting relationship with China and with the West. As if she refused to settle down to a fixed opinion; as if she preferred to remain exiled, nomad, thrown in the middle of a multi-layered and ever-changing battle. If anything, I wish that she had explored this ambivalence even further, and fiercely; and I wish that she had told a more detailed story of her first years in the UK. What about the roads not taken? Or the new personal myths acquired in the new land? Maybe this is material for another book. While structured as a journey, Nine Continents’ myths are still very much rooted in the East: drenched in sea salt and in the scent of gardenias that persistently grow between dry rocks.

Absolutely wonderful memoir by a woman beyond impressive. She talks about alienation and perseverance, about loss and art, about growing up and finding herself, and everything in-between.

Xiaolu Guo's life sounds like something out of a movie: born to an intellectual who had spent time in a labour camp and a mother who was part of the Red Guard (yes, her parents met in prison), given away at birth, and then given back to her grandparents (both analphabets; her grandmother of a generation where having your feet bound was normal; their relationship scarily abusive), ripped away again to go and live with her parents, she manages to attend an elite university for film-making and then to win a scholarship to study in the UK - a country that became her home. Her book is a piece of art itself.

I adored the way she plays with language; her not writing in her mother-tongue (as she has been doing for a while now) just adds to the immediacy and the sense of alienation. The further back in time she goes, the more fragmented her language becomes. When she comes closer to finding her place in the world and the person she can be, the sentences get longer, more assured. I adored this.

At the centre of her memoir are her relationships: with her artist father who influences her in a myriad of ways but cannot (or will not) protect her from her mother's harshness and her brother's scorn. But also her complicated relationship with China and how it influences her art and what she can and cannot write about. She writes about censorship - both external and internal and how this made it impossible for her to be the writer she knows in her heart she can be. She also writes about not fitting in anywhere and how she puts this into pieces of art. This is what makes this book both personal and universal - underneath all the cultural differences there is this common human theme of wanting to be true to yourself and of experiences of alienation but also homecoming in a foreign country. I appreciated this.

First sentence: "So many times I've seen England from the sky."

Upon the birth of her daughter in England, writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo reflects on her life up to this point: her early years raised by her grandparents in a Chinese fishing village by the sea, her school years with her parents in an industrial town, her delve into film studies in a rapidly changing Beijing. It's a fascinating life story, with sharp commentary on misogyny and art.

Nine Continents was a sad story to read. The author was abandoned by two sets of parents before spending her formative years with her grandparents who barely scraped by. Then she went to live with her biological parents and suffered. She found solace in her father but was never close to her mother. She seemed to just drift thorough life, waiting. Finally, she earned a place at cinema school in Beijing and then moved to England. This book is an engrossing read.

Author Xiaolu Guo speaks about her childhood and her coming of age in an oppressive, paternalistic China. Raised by illiterate grandparents, she finds her voice through art and writing. Overall, this was a pretty generic book. It is a bit boring, a bit forgettable.

In this raw poignant memoir,Xiaolu explores her life as a young child through her adulthood, from the impoverished village of Shitang, China to the cosmopolitan world of London. We first learn that she was given away to another family but then returned to her grandparents at age 2 due to their inability to feed her and her resultant malnutrition. Growing up she experienced unexpressed love from her grandmother but a mute response from her grandfather who would eat by himself and beat his wife frequently. Eventually she was reunited with her parents and moved to another city, where she had to cope with a brother who resented her,a practical harsh mother with an inability to show love,and an artistic father who opened her eyes to the creative process. As the years progress we are introduced to the treatment of women, sexual abuse,the effects of the Cultural Revolution, film school and censorship that diminishes ingenuity.and Xiaolu's desperate ambition to make something of herself and leave her stifling confinement . I particularly loved learning the historical context and social mores that influenced her difficult life.Not only was this an individual's heartfelt story but it is an important contribution assisting the Western world to understand and appreciate the China of yesteryear.

“The girl is a peasant warrior”, the old monk announced. “She will cross the sea and travel to the Nine Continents.” So said the Daoshi, a Taoist monk, to whom the very young Xiaolu was once taken by her deeply religious grandmother. These prophetic words laid down the pattern for Xiaolu’s life. As a tiny baby, she was taken by her parents to be fostered by a simple peasant couple living in the hill country of south-eastern China, but times were hard and the food was scarce. The baby girl, then two years old but starving and sick, was handed over to her paternal grandparents in the fishing village of Shitang on the coast. Her grandfather was a fisherman who regularly and viciously beat his tiny hunch-backed foot-bound wife, who suffered in silence - as was the fate of most voiceless, downtrodden Chinese women at the time.

At the onset of the Cultural Revolution, the fishing boats were all taken by the state, and the fishermen were forced to work in a fishing collective. The grandfather, always fiercely independent, did not last long under the new dispensation, and he tried to eke out a meagre living by beach combing and selling whatever he could find. Most of the money he earned was spent on rotgut alcohol, and he became even more violent in his drunkenness.

Xiaolu was a solitary child, but one day, at the age of six, she saw a group of university art students from a nearby town, who were out on a field trip to sketch and paint by the sea. Watching them create colour, light and movement out of what she had always seen and accepted as a flat, featureless seascape opened her eyes to the possibility of a different future and a wonderful new world and the seed of determination to reach out to this world was shown. This was a pivotal moment in her life.

When she was seven years old, and not long after her grandfather committed suicide, Xiaolu’s parents came to take her to live with them in Wenling, an industrial inland town. Virtually ignored by her mother and her newly-discovered older brother, she was much closer to her artist father who encouraged her to think, to read and to write poetry. He was a pillar of strength throughout her school life and her subsequent years at the Beijing Film Academy, and she was eventually awarded a scholarship to study at the National Film and TV School in the UK. She settled in London, became a successful published author – in English – and after one or two rather unhappy relationships she met Steve, an Australian with whom she fell in love, eventually giving birth to a baby girl they called Moon.

Shortly after Moon’s birth, Xiaolu’s father died of throat cancer and her mother, who never had a good word to say to her, died a few years later of stomach cancer. It was only after her mother’s death that she finally shrugged off a lifetime of being disapproved of and being put down, realising, at last, the full worth of her achievements and successes in spite of seemingly impossible odds. The peasant warrior had lived up to her name and her calling. This is a searingly honest, beautifully written autobiography. It makes for compulsive reading, and I have no hesitation in awarding it five stars.

Bennie Bookworm

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

Excerpt from Review: "...Through Xiaolu we learn about the culture of small, poor towns in China, their people’s beliefs and practices. We also learn of the growth of movie media throughout the years in China and the restrictions placed upon art by the government, depending on the regime in charge. Most importantly, we travel through it with a young woman strong enough to rise above adversity and make her mark on the world. Nine Continents is definitely worth reading!"

I loved this book,it bout a baby that isn't wanted by her parents and she lived with her grandparents in China,I loved the story about living with her grandparents,then her real parents come to take her back hom,I won't spoil to,a very very good book,couldn't put it down

I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I like to read memoirs and especially those where the author is writing about something which really holds your interest. This is one of those books. I found the description of the author's childhood totally absorbing. Her life in a small fishing village, living with her grandparents, was so totally different to my own childhood in the UK. And then suddenly her parents appear from nowhere and she is taken away to live in a city and her life changes significantly.

This is a fascinating read. The transition from childhood to independent adulthood and from rural China to the world beyond China is so well described. There are some shocking parts, not least the reflections on identity and the effect of dual citizenship.

Thus is a beautifully written and insightful look into growing up in China during the 1980's. It covers many topics throughout the memoirs including the family structure, the arts, death, life comparisons to Europe, love, new technology. It is an eye opening glimpse into an unknown world. Magnificent.