Description:
Born unwanted and raised by a resentful grandmother in a poverty-stricken remote part of China, little Jing Li didn't have a chance. Teachers were her saviors and books were her friends. Could they take her out of China?
Brief description: Born in a remote area of China where illiteracy, famine, starvation, and absence of water and sewer systems were normal, Jing Li's irrepressible desire to learn trumped her circumstances. Jing Li earned her AA in English at Taiyuan Teachers' College, Shanxi, China (1979), and her BA in English at the Beijing Foreign Language University (1985) and became a top ranked high school English teacher in Taiyuan City at the No. 5 Secondary School. Through various competitions Ms. Li won her way to America, which eventually allowed her to earn her MA in Education from Southern Nazarene University, Oklahoma (1990). Ms. Li achieved her California Mandarin Chinese/English credential as well as her California Multiple Subject Elementary Credential and taught elementary, high school and college in the U.S. for over 30 years. Red Sandals is her first published book.
Review Quotes:
The Red Sandals: A Memoir by Jing Li is a powerful yet heart-wrenching and at times harrowing read. Li's memoir commences with her recollections of her early childhood in Red Stone Bridge village in China's Shanxi province, as a child unwanted by her mother and treated with harshness and cruelty by her grandmother, who was her caregiver at the time. Joining herparents and two younger brothers, Nimble and Cricket, in the dusty city of Taiyuan at the age of eight, Jing Li continued to face rejection, deprivation, hunger, ill health, and fear. Despite these adversities and the clamping down on education during Mao's Cultural Revolution, Jing Li's resilient spirit fought on. Her incredible drive to get educated, become a teacher of English, and ultimately emigrate is truly inspirational.
Jing Li's writing is blunt and direct, speaking of things as they were- the reader is not presented with any sugar-coating. The grim starkness of Li's youth is counterbalanced by her ability to write with exquisite detail about things of great natural beauty in the village of her early years and its surrounds. I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of the various photographs of family, peers, and colleagues, and the accompanying analysis of them that Li oftenincludes. I studied the photographs long and hard, seeking insightinto the actual people being written about. Writing this memoirmust have been a cathartic and painful experience for the author. Reading The Red Sandals was a privilege. Ultimately, I was leftuplifted by Li's indomitable human spirit.
Frances Deborah Kerr-Phillips for Readers' Favorite
The Red Sandals is a non-fiction memoir by Jing Li and is suitable for all ages. Following the author's early life in Northern China, her very existence as a daughter rather than a son earned her the displeasure of her family. The depiction of the author's early youth was particularly heart-breaking as the natural instinct to be childish and joyful was met with abuse and resentment from her grandmother; both are beautifully depicted with prose that uses the sweetness of one to highlight the bitterness of the other but never goes so far into doom that the underlying optimism of the story is undermined. As the author's childhood becomes a rollercoaster of ups and downs with a supportive teacher who encourages her to learn, only for them to be taken away when the author is sent to live as a servant to her parents and brothers where the oppression of her developing soul only grows greater. As school becomes the opportunity for salvation, the cultural revolution threatens to take it away again. Jing Li's uphill battle to become a successful teacher at one of the country's top schools is an incredible journey to behold, and Li's gift for language depicts the harrowing nature of every cruel word thrown at her with devastating emotional effect. But just as it depicts the darkness of her life, The Red Sandals never falls short of being a story of hope. It is a beautiful tale of one woman struggling against a world, that initially felt like it didn't want her in it, to find success and happiness in her life.
Lexie Fox for Readers' Favorite