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I recently gifted this book to a friend who was enthralled by the compelling story. I did not get my copy, because the other source I tried to use was out of the book, but look forward to getting another copy myself.

the beauty of this book is that it's true! I grew up in China but left mainland quite a while ago. It was very interesting to learn the real experience of an insider who was really close to all the authority.

It's an amazing story to begin with and all the details remind me much of China and help me to learn a lot about the country i grow up in. I find it very interesting.

This is an account of Prof Engelmann and his love story while visiting China. Larry actually gave me this book in person. Some he told me briefly. The version (1999) I had was published through John Wiley and sons is good. I wish the fonts are little larger to improve the readability.

Larry and I were supposed to take a walk about Silicon Valley past as both us have lots of historical stories to tell. We did not make the visit before the tear down. He became ill and passed away suddenly. I found this book today and glanced over. I miss him.

The relationship between China and the United States is extraordinarily complex, seemingly made up of equal parts hope, racism, & misunderstanding. The hope is a product of over a century's worth of Protestant missionaries trying to bring the Good Word to an enormous population of potential converts and of millions of Chinese immigrants finding economic opportunity here in the States. The racism too flows both ways, with each nation's people believing the other's to be barbarians. The mutual misunderstanding comes from myriad sources, but probably has its greatest impetus in the most fundamental difference between the two cultures, the difference which paradoxically serves as the main attractant and repellent between the two : American openness and Chinese reserve. In a sense, what each values in the other is what it has least of itself. The image of the "Ugly American," though partly a caricature, is also fair to the extent that it's a product of our inability to keep our opinions, ideas, and feelings to ourselves. Meanwhile, the competing image of the "inscrutable Oriental," though freighted with racist overtones, reflects American inability to understand people who don't "share" as much of themselves as we do. It's easy to see then that two peoples who are so different would find each other intriguing. Daughter of China plumbs these themes, both on a personal and a political level, and, though a little uneven, serves as a valuable look at one Chinese woman's confrontation with East and West.
Meihong Xu was raised in the rural village of Lishi. A devoted Maoist from an early age, even to the point of allowing political suspicions to color her perceptions of her father and a devoted Aunt, she joined the People's Liberation Army in 1981 and was chosen to become one of the "twelve pandas," a dozen young women selected for an elite intelligence unit and sent for special training at the prestigious Institute for International Relations in Nanjing. Once there however, she became a disciple of an at least mildly pro-Western officer, known as "the Coffee General" for his Western ways, including a preference for coffee over tea. He hoped to open an institute which would immerse trainees in American culture and so Meihong was sent in 1988 to the Center for Chinese and American Studies, a joint venture of Johns Hopkins and Nanjing University. There, in addition to her studies, she was asked by a friend in the Ministry of State Security to keep an eye on Larry Engelmann, an American instructor they suspected of spying.
In accordance with her assignment she cultivated a relationship with Engelmann, but soon found him too naive and trusting too conceivably be an intelligence operative. Moreover, his innocence, good humor and emotional openness was so appealing to her that she found herself becoming enamored with him. Engelmann, for his part, lonely, unhappy, and thousands of miles from home, fell in love with her. But their nascent relationship was abruptly ended when Chinese Intelligence ordered Engelmann out of the country and arrested and interrogated Xu, apparently motivated in large part by the desire of certain elements within the government to use her to get at the Coffee General and other pro-West officials. Xu ended up being expelled from the PLA and sent back to her village, to work as a peasant. But she eventually got word to Engelmann in the States and the remainder of the book details their efforts to get her out of China.
Though the story is billed a romance, there's an awkward unreality to the relationship between Xu and Engelmann, who seem at times to be in love with the idea of each other more than with the actual person. But the political portrait of modern China more than makes up for any weaknesses in the love angle. Meihong Xu's journey from committed daughter of the revolution to doubt-filled young adult to San Jose, California makes for really compelling reading. One of the most unfortunate aspects of the American-Chinese relationship, and this I think is mostly a product of latent racism, is that we in the West do not take seriously the mass murder, repression, and aggression of China's Communist government. We are all too willing to minimize their crimes, or excuse them altogether, as an unfortunate byproduct of an understandable nationalist reaction to decades of Western imperialism.
It would be better for all concerned, but especially for the people of China, if we in the West understood the reality of life there better. The best way to develop this understanding is for a dissident literary tradition to emerge, as it did in the Soviet Union. This has begun to happen with books like this one, the works of Anchee Min (other than the unfortunate Becoming Madame Mao), and other authors like Ha Jin. Most significantly, Philip Short's great recent biography of Mao goes a long way to revising the largely benign view of him, and the recently released Tiananmen Papers may prove a turning point similar to the publication of Solzhenitsyn's devastating Gulag Archipelago.
The ultimate value of this book then lies not in its love story, which is charming enough though ultimately not terribly compelling (to anyone but the participants); it lies instead in its revelatory portrait of one young woman's experiences in Red China, a nightmare world no less repressive and monstrous than the USSR. In this regard it is invaluable and I recommend it to anyone who still harbors the belief that Maoist China has been qualitatively different from any of the old Iron Curtain regimes.
GRADE : B

The subtitle may cause confusion. Many readers have complained about this book not being a love story the title claims. Reviewers question Xu Meihong's motive in marrying Professor Larry Engelmann. "She loves him, or does she?" Comments like this flood the reviews. Love and romance aside, *Daughter of China* tells of all the oppressive, threatening, secretive, manipulative practices of the Communist Party. Much of what happened to Meihong and her family, as she has noted, is what foreigners don't see and beyond their imagination. "It doesn't mean it's not there just because you don't see it."
Xu Meihong grew up during the upheaval of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution and was admitted into the PLA (People's Liberation Army) at the age of 17. Selected as one of the 12 Pandas, she was among the country's sharpest women matriculated at the Institute of Interational Relations in Nanjing. She became a member of the elite intelligence corps and was told to spy on visiting American professor Larry Engelmann. As Meihong got to know the professor, she realized "this man has nothing to do with breaching Chinese national security" and Meihong's old loyalties to the Red party began to shake. She started to "have compunction" for Larry and tried to protect him from being pursued or possibly arrested by the Chinese government. When their friendship was discovered, Meihong was arrested, beaten, interrogated, and imprisoned by PLA Colonel. She decided that she would not sacrifice Larry in exchange for her own life. When told to sign a forged petition that falsely accused Larry of raping her, Meihong firmly took her ground and refused. Professor Engelmann was asked to leave the country. Upon expulsion from the Institute and thus the PLA, Xu Meihong was sent back to her village in Lishi in Jiangsu province. She was forevered marked by the government and that "there will never be a normal life for her in China again." Her dossier will forever her everywhere she settles down.
This book is stunning in the way how Meihong Xu has disclosed some of the darkest PLA practices. She recalled the warning given to all incoming cadets about keeping everything confidential: the Institute's location, phone number, contents of the courses, modes of training, etc. Yet in this book she has gone through even the details of their rifle practice, how the cadets were required to work the AK-47 blindfolded because enemies could spew an attack at night. She talks about her interrogation by PLA colonel in gory details. "The truth, is what [the PLA colonel] say it is. It is not for you to decide or to judge." Therefore, if one proclaims innocence upon his arrest, it will only compound the seriousness of one's wrongdoing.
The book also depicts power struggle wintin the Communist Party. The country finds itself at a point where the old conservatives, those who disfavor party reforms, conflict with the younger party reformists. When Meihong was arrested for her association with a foreigner (which affects national security as the PLA claims), the colonel wanted desperately to use her and her relationship with Larry to unmask, discredit and purge a clique of PLA officers who had been working quietly for broad reforms in the military.
If Anchee Min's *Red Azalea* has been a joltingly honest account of life under Mao China, *Daughter of China* is an extraordinary tale of how a PLA officer with a bright, promising future battles turns herself into an enemy of the PLA and battles for her love and freedom. Meihong had seen firsthand how the Party and the PLA used deception and lies to confound its own and to turn friend against friend and lover against lover, even family member against family member. In a sense, *Daughter of China* is more realistic than *Red Azalea*. The tales about Meihong's aunt Lingdi being purged, her mother working far northeast during the famine to support the family, her great-grandfather being dropped in boiling oil again testify to the austere, oppressed lives of common people under Mao China. 4.3 stars.