标题: Book Review on 'The Little Red Guard' [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 4-30-2012 09:13 标题: Book Review on 'The Little Red Guard' Michael Fathers, Coming of Age In Mao's China. Death cannot be controlled by the party, but disposing of a body can. So the author's father built a coffin in secret at his mother's request. Wall Street Journal, Apr 30, 2012. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 50293906310780.html
(book review on Wenguang Huang, The Little Red Guard; A family memoir. Riverhead, 2012)
(a) In this review, "his" mostly refers to author's father, but occasionally, to the author. What stumped me was this sentence in paragraph 1:
"The focus of this delightful family memoir by Wenguang Huang, a Chinese-born writer now based in Chicago, is a simple wooden coffin that a lowly member of the Communist Party, the author's father, had secretly built for his mother in the mid-1970s, as a present for her 73rd birthday.
Here, "his" refers to the father.
(b) The review says, "Grandma Huang, ruling over her son, his short-tempered wife and their four children, emerges as one of the more memorable figures of modern memoir."
If the "over" is dropped, the meaning remains the same.
(c) At the end of the review is this introduction: "Mr Fathers is co-author of 'Tiananmen: The Rape of Peking,' an account of China's 1989 democracy movement.
(i) Michael Fathers and Andrew Higgins, Tiananmen; The rape of Peking. The Independent in association with Doubleday, 1989.
(ii) Michael Fathers, News Tiananmen Ten Years On: `I wept for the people, betrayed by their leaders.' The Independent, June 4, 1999. http://www.independent.co.uk/new ... eaders-1097997.html
(A) APC: armored personnel carrier
(B)
* blub (vi): "chiefly British: BLUBBER"
* blubber (vi; Middle English blubren to make a bubbling sound): "to weep noisily"
Please note: blubber (n; Middle English bluber bubble, foam, probably of imitative origin):
"the fat of whales and other large marine mammals"