Ting Xing Ye's Books

My Name Is Number 4

A True Story from the Cultural Revolution

By: Ting-Xing Ye

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My Name Is Number 4

A True Story from the Cultural Revolution

By: Ting-Xing Ye

Number Four will have a difficult life. These are the words that were uttered upon Ting-xing Ye's birth. Soon this prophecy would prove only too true. . . . Here is the real-life story about the fourth child in a family torn apart by China's Cultural Revolution. After the death of both of her parents, Ting-xing and her siblings endured brutal Red Guard attacks on their schools and even in their home. At the age of sixteen, Ting-xing is exiled to a prison farm far from the world she knows. How she struggled through years of constant terror while keeping her spirit intact is at the heart of My Name Is Number 4. Haunting and inspiring, Ting-xing Ye's personal account of this horri?c period in history is one that no reader will soon forget.

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Page Count

244

Publisher

Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

1429989726

ISBN 13

9781429989725

A Leaf In The Bitter Wind

A Memoir

By: Ting-Xing Ye

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A Leaf In The Bitter Wind

A Memoir

By: Ting-Xing Ye

One of the best ways to understand history is through eye-witness accounts. Ting-Xing Ye’s riveting first book, A Leaf in the Bitter Wind, is a memoir of growing up in Maoist China. It was an astonishing coming of age through the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1974). In the wave of revolutionary fervour, peasants neglected their crops, exacerbating the widespread hunger. While Ting-Xing was a young girl in Shanghai, her father’s rubber factory was expropriated by the state, and he was demoted to a labourer. A botched operation left him paralyzed from the waist down, and his health deteriorated rapidly since a capitalist’s well-being was not a priority. He died soon after, and then Ting-Xing watched her mother’s struggle with poverty end in stomach cancer. By the time she was thirteen, Ting-Xing Ye was an orphan, entrusted with her brothers and sisters to her Great-Aunt, and on welfare. Still, the Red Guards punished the children for being born into the capitalist class. Schools were being closed; suicide was rampant; factories were abandoned for ideology; distrust of friends and neighbours flourished. Ting-Xing was sent to work on a distant northern prison farm at sixteen, and survived six years of backbreaking labour and severe conditions. She was mentally tortured for weeks until she agreed to sign a false statement accusing friends of anti-state activities. Somehow finding the time to teach herself English, often by listening to the radio, she finally made it to Beijing University in 1974 as the Revolution was on the wane — though the acquisition of knowledge was still frowned upon as a bourgeois desire and study was discouraged. Readers have been stunned and moved by this simply narrated personal account of a 1984-style ideology-gone-mad, where any behaviour deemed to be bourgeois was persecuted with the ferocity and illogic of a witch trial, and where a change in politics could switch right to wrong in a moment. The story of both a nation and an individual, the book spans a heady 35 years of Ye’s life in China, until her eventual defection to Canada in 1987 — and the wonderful beginning of a romance with Canadian author William Bell. The book was published in 1997. The 1990s saw the publication of several memoirs by Chinese now settled in North America. Ye’s was not the first, yet earned a distinguished place as one of the most powerful, and the only such memoir written from Canada. It is the inspiring story of a woman refusing to “drift with the stream” and fighting her way through an impossible, unjust system. This compelling, heart-wrenching story has been published in Germany, Japan, the US, UK and Australia, where it went straight to #1 on the bestseller list and has been reprinted several times; Dutch, French and Turkish editions will appear in 2001.

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Page Count

417

Publisher

Anchor Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0385674147

ISBN 13

9780385674140

My Name is Number 4

A True Story

By: Ting-Xing Ye

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My Name is Number 4

A True Story

By: Ting-Xing Ye

A powerful and passionate memoir for young readers, Ting-xing Ye tells, through the eyes of a child, the moving story of growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution. When Ting-xing Ye was born her aunt declared, “Ah Si shi ge lao lu ming” – Number Four will have a difficult life – for the signs were unlucky. Events soon bore out this cruel prediction. Here is the true story of fourteen-year-old Ting-xing’s tumultuous life turned upside down by China’s Cultural Revolution. After the death of both her parents, Ting-xing and her four siblings endure the brutality of Red Guard attacks on their schools and even their house as they struggle against poverty and hunger. At sixteen, Ting-xing herself is exiled to a prison farm far from home. Full of personal and historical detail about this dramatic period in Chinese history, My Name is Number 4 has at its centre the feisty and courageous Ting-xing, fighting to survive as a young woman caught up in events beyond her control.

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Page Count

242

Publisher

Doubleday Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0385673868

ISBN 13

9780385673860

Throwaway Daughter

By: Ting-Xing Ye

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Throwaway Daughter

By: Ting-Xing Ye

A Canadian teenager travels to China to explore her ancestry and search for her birth mother in a dramatic and moving YA novel. Throwaway Daughter tells the story of Grace Dong-mei Parker, whose biggest concern is how to distill her adoption from China into the neat blanks of her personal history assignment. Aside from the unwelcome reminders of difference, Grace loves passing for the typical Canadian teen — until the day she witnesses the Tiananmen massacre on the news. Horrified, she sets out to explore her Chinese ancestry, only to discover that she was one of the thousands of infant girls abandoned in China since the introduction of the one-child policy, strictly enforced by the Communist government. But Grace was one of the lucky ones, adopted as a baby by a loving Canadian couple. With the encouragement of her adoptive parents, she studies Chinese and travels back to China in search of her birth mother. She manages to locate the village where she was born, but at first no one is willing to help her. However, Grace never gives up and, finally, she is reunited with her birth mother, discovering through this emotional bond the truth of what happened to her almost twenty years before.

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Page Count

257

Publisher

Tundra Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1774880342

ISBN 13

9781774880340

A Leaf In The Bitter Wind

A Memoir

By: Ting-Xing Ye

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A Leaf In The Bitter Wind

A Memoir

By: Ting-Xing Ye

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Page Count

417

Publisher

Anchor Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0385674147

ISBN 13

9780385674140

White Lily

By: Ting-Xing Ye

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White Lily

By: Ting-Xing Ye

Nearly a century ago, in the Forbidden City, China’s last emperor reigned from his dragon throne. Although he was only a boy, the imperial decrees issued in his name echoed in every corner of the country. Every man had to shave his head and wear a single pigtail to symbolize his submission to the emperor, and every woman was second in importance to the men in her family. Women were obedient to their fathers and brothers and later to the husbands in their arranged marriages. Certainly no woman was encouraged to attend school or to show any independence. Into this world, in a village in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, White Lily was born. She had a happy childhood, running and playing, until, at the age of four, she was forced to undergo the painful procedure of foot binding required for all females of her social class. But White Lily has her heart set on more than a traditional role in society, and she enlists the support of her beloved elder brother. Together they devise a plan to defy tradition and convince their father that White Lily’s feet and mind must be allowed to grow.

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