Jia Pingwa

Maybe even 3.5* -- I was in a reading slump while I was reading this and I think that affected my rating somewhat. This book reminded me somewhat of the American classic "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair which I recently reread. Both books tell the reader about life in a city as recently arrived laborers, the struggle to make ends meet & the ways in which these lowest workers are taken advantage of. Generally I like this sort of 'social commentary' type of fiction, even when it is gritty, so I would be willing to try rereading this at some point.… (mehr)

Maybe even 3.5* -- I was in a reading slump while I was reading this and I think that affected my rating somewhat. This book reminded me somewhat of the American classic "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair which I recently reread. Both books tell the reader about life in a city as recently arrived laborer, the struggle to make ends meet & the ways in which these lowest workers are taken advantage of. Generally I like this sort of 'social commentary' type of fiction, even when it is gritty, so I would be willing to try rereading this at some point.… (mehr)

The story of Hawa "Happy" Liu who along with his friend, Wufu, travel to the city to be trash pickers. It really is a very mundane story of 2 men sorting through a city's trash. The words are short and clipped (maybe due to translation) and full of scatology. There just wasn't much good to say about this book. It could have been the topic as Happy and Wufu's life was depressing and as hard as they worked there was nothing they could do to better it. The entire last chapter of the book was the author describing where he got the ideas for much of his book and on whom the characters were based. From this last chapter I inferred that this story is supposed to tell of the plight of the country residents during China's industrialization. Besides being too long, I really can't say I learned anything from the book or that it entertained me---so I would not recommend it. 494 pages… (mehr)