Book Review: Made in China by Anna Qu

´I am beginning to realiye that we are all raised by children. Children that are shaped by their own traumas, some of them unable to forget or overcome what happened to them before they passed it along´.

There are so many good memoirs written recently by Chinese-American authors, but Made in China by Anna Qu has a completely different take as it goes beyond hunting the American dream and focuses instead on the generational trauma present within her family. 

Born in mailand China, she was left with her grandparents after the death of her father, as her mother went to America for a better life. Few years later, she is brought to America, trying to fit in a new family, after her mother remarried a Taiwanese sweatshop businessman, with whom she had already two other children. But she will end up being treated horribly by her mother, including by being forced to work in their parents´ factory long hours, without being allowed to get her own money. Beaten and traumatised, she will ask the help of the social services, in whose report that she later obtained her dramatic situation is hardly acknowledged.

With the attention of a journalist, Qu is trying to understand the conflictual pattern of her relationship with her mother, what was her mother´s and other women in her family trauma pattern that made possible such an emotional detachment lacking any motherly empathy. The complex context of the Chinese cultural revolution, the iron will of creating a new, better life for her family within the accepted limits of the social mobility allowed for Chinese immigrants in America - ´Sweatshops and assembly work were an essential part of what it meant to be American in our family´, her mother never succeeded to be fully literated in English  - while sometimes being unable to actually provide their children with the mental comfort and emotional safety they were so in high need for.

I particularly liked the nonfiction style of the memoir, trying to describe and understand instead of trying to magnify her life events through dramatic lenses. She is outsourcing her information with historical and social data, although I felt that the part of her story covering the working time at a failed startup too dense and at a certain extent out of place within the story. I also felt that there is a disbalance between the details of her time spent in China as a child, and her time in the US, where we are only later and in small bits shared information about her hobbys and her school life and friends.

Made in China is an important 1 person contribution to understanding the Chinese-American psyche, but first and foremost is the unique testimony of family estrangement and traumatic historical events translated at the very everyday level of the simple human beings that experienced it.

Rating: 4.5 stars