Her interest in the island’s past didn’t begin in earnest until she hit college. She visited a couple times and spent time with family. The result of that labor is a sweeping story, as epic in scope as the story is intimate, that spans six tumultuous decades of Taiwanese history through the experience of one family.Ī Taiwanese-American born in Sacramento, Ryan, 39, didn’t have deep thoughts about her mother’s homeland growing up. The book came screaming out of author Shawna Yang Ryan, too, only her labor pains lasted much longer. “It kind of took over my life for the last decade and a half,” she said. That one dispute, between an officer and a street vendor, was the flashpoint of a civil uprising that would result in tens of thousands of imprisonments and deaths and decades of martial law. 28 Incident casts a long shadow over Taipei. “My mother Li Min’s labor pains began the night that the widow was beaten in front of the Tian-ma Teahouse,” the book opens. We each come screaming into this world, but when the unnamed narrator of “Green Island” was born on a February night in 1947, the world was screaming with her.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |