A nothing burger should be your title. I was going to comment about how they may have taped Olivia Wang's ears to her head I didn't recognize her. But that was too mean, I edited myself.
In the novel, he doesn't betray over Awu but due to Xiao Qi vying for the throne
I couldn't finish the novel - Awu was too narcissistic I couldn't stomach her constant raving over her own beauty. Can you explain how is General Song even in line for the throne? Isn't he just a commoner like Xiao Qi or is he someone's secret son?
It’s only 5.1 on Douban. The real story as to why it was pulled was likely they were concerned about a box office…
Yeah I re-watched some bits later in the afternoon and I realized the plot is simple but good. It just doesn't come across because it was told in such a poor way - as if the narrative was secondary to the action. I think the shifu role was the most interesting role I wish Mark Chao had taken that one on instead.
It’s only 5.1 on Douban. The real story as to why it was pulled was likely they were concerned about a box office flop. If there is any real risk of plagiarism Netflix would definitely have pulled it.
I was enjoying the article until I got caught off and asked to pay, LOL!
Oops - enjoy:
On Aug. 28, 1980, a young professor from Beijing stepped off a plane at the San Francisco airport. His sponsors met him, welcomed “our new scholar from China” and took him for a meal in Chinatown. What may have seemed an unremarkable moment was anything but: The professor was among the first Chinese academics to come to the U.S., and he carried with him, beyond his suitcase and credentials, a collection of improbable and harrowing experiences.
“Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America” is Weijian Shan’s deeply affecting memoir. It is also a story that mirrors China’s dizzying recent history: the Cultural Revolution, with all its madness; the opening to the United States, with all the promise it held; and Deng Xiaoping’s decision to unleash a market-based system, with all the changes it wrought. Mr. Shan has lived this history, suffered from its excesses and thrived thanks to the opening. Today he is one of the more respected and successful financiers in the “new China.”
PHOTO: WSJ OUT OF THE GOBI By Weijian Shan (Wiley, 465 pages, $29.95)
Mr. Shan in Urat Qianqi, shortly after his arrival in the Gobi in 1969. PHOTO: WEIJIAN SHAN/WILEY Mr. Shan was born in 1953 in Shandong Province, in northeastern China. He was 13 when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution and 15 when the chairman announced plans to send idle students “up to the mountains and down to the countryside.” Mao believed that the mobilization of young people would clear the cities of “troublemakers,” offer youth the collective wisdom of the peasantry and help build a proletariat paradise across vast stretches of rural China.
Millions of young Chinese responded, and at first Mr. Shan embraced the call. In September 1969, he boarded a train for Hohhot, a city on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia. It seemed, he recalls, “the most glorious day of my life.” Why would a 15-year-old run headlong to the Gobi? “We were not content,” Mr. Shan writes, “with watching all the action around us. We wanted to join the revolution as well.” Mr. Shan’s parents—his father was a customs official, his mother a secretary—were either supportive or powerless to say otherwise. The author says he was never quite sure.
So began a six-year odyssey for Mr. Shan, as a member of the Inner Mongolia Construction Army Corps. It didn’t take long for his enthusiasm to fade. His platoon passed long days laying bricks and nights keeping watch over frozen potato fields, and when word came of a possible Soviet invasion, the teenagers were ordered to crawl over manure-laden ground as part of their training. At times Mr. Shan and his friends were gripped by a hunger that drove them to “eat everything we could catch”—stray dogs and cats, insects, and, on one occasion, an owl.
Beyond the physical trauma, there was the soul-crushing experience of learning that the suffering was in the service of a flawed idea. Nearly every one of the corps’ projects failed, either in conception or execution or both. As for educating the peasants, that notion fell apart on first contact. “In truth,” writes Mr. Shan, “the peasants hated and feared us.”
Mr. Shan relates such episodes in a measured voice that adds to their power. Yet perhaps the most memorable moments in the book come when windows open for Mr. Shan and paths “out of the Gobi” emerge. Though he writes of his past with humility, it is clear that he possessed uncommon intelligence, resilience and an ability to seize any shred of opportunity. In late 1971 he learned of a fresh directive from Beijing: “Universities are still needed . . . [and] students should be selected from among workers and peasants who have practical experiences.” A flash of hope shot through him. “This, I realized, could be the miracle I had been hoping for.”
His next journey, to university in Beijing and ultimately to America, is told with flair and occasional humor. He tries everything—even taking up volleyball refereeing in Gobi, which he figures (correctly, it turns out) might boost his odds of a ticket out. Later, when a choice of American universities looms, there is a priceless exchange with a Chinese adviser. Three institutions are on offer. Stanford? “I’ve never heard of it,” the adviser tells him. “It must be an obscure school.” Berkeley? “The University of California must be pretty good, but this one apparently is a branch school.” The University of San Francisco? “I have heard so much about San Francisco,” the man says. “This one must be the best of these.” Three weeks later Mr. Shan was there.
Once in California, he marvels at hot showers and TV commercials and at the fact that residents with deer and squirrels in their backyards don’t go after them in pursuit of a meal. He also puzzles over a certain American epithet. In the Gobi, cow dung had been a precious commodity, a critical source of fuel. So why does a blunt English word for it carry such negative associations?
One drawback of “Out of the Gobi” is the relatively little time that Mr. Shan devotes to his later life. This man who never had a day of high school would earn advanced degrees in business from the University of San Francisco and that “branch school” at Berkeley, but more than three-quarters of the book is spent in the desert; the time in the U.S. is wonderfully drawn but brief. He writes only sparingly about the emotional toll of being separated from his wife, who initially remained in China, and of the birth of their first child and the struggle to bring them both to the U.S. His ascent in the world of high finance in China—begun with a job in Hong Kong in 1993—is relegated to a final paragraph.
How, one wonders, does today’s wild pace of change and growth in China look to a man who has suffered as Mr. Shan has and who now benefits from those changes? The author seems to anticipate the question. “How I got into playing high-stakes money games,” he writes in an epilogue, “is perhaps another story worth telling.” Indeed it is.
Mr. Nagorski is executive vice president of the Asia Society and the author of “Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack.”
Wonderful review, as always :)I love the caption, cloudy with a chance of meatballs! That is priceless :DI do…
Hahaha - indeed they all went to Hogwarts...
I enjoyed your review as well and I wish I enjoyed the movie as much as you did. I am gonna "ahem" borrow it so that I can pass it off as mine to my nieces...
5. in the novel she has 2 kids + an adopted daughter. In the drama, who knows. I can't answer 1, 3, 4 because…
From what I understand, in the novel she has 2 kids but she dies young due to poor health. They could 1. be following that; 2. have her live a long life with XQ but have no kids or 3. she is completely cured and has kids. I hope for 3 but I have have a fear they will go for 2 and just have them adopt a bunch of orphaned kids as their own. After all XQ was also an orphan.
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Its your title... please yourself on it...
I was going to comment about how they may have taped Olivia Wang's ears to her head I didn't recognize her. But that was too mean, I edited myself.
On Aug. 28, 1980, a young professor from Beijing stepped off a plane at the San Francisco airport. His sponsors met him, welcomed “our new scholar from China” and took him for a meal in Chinatown. What may have seemed an unremarkable moment was anything but: The professor was among the first Chinese academics to come to the U.S., and he carried with him, beyond his suitcase and credentials, a collection of improbable and harrowing experiences.
“Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America” is Weijian Shan’s deeply affecting memoir. It is also a story that mirrors China’s dizzying recent history: the Cultural Revolution, with all its madness; the opening to the United States, with all the promise it held; and Deng Xiaoping’s decision to unleash a market-based system, with all the changes it wrought. Mr. Shan has lived this history, suffered from its excesses and thrived thanks to the opening. Today he is one of the more respected and successful financiers in the “new China.”
PHOTO: WSJ
OUT OF THE GOBI
By Weijian Shan
(Wiley, 465 pages, $29.95)
Mr. Shan in Urat Qianqi, shortly after his arrival in the Gobi in 1969.
PHOTO: WEIJIAN SHAN/WILEY
Mr. Shan was born in 1953 in Shandong Province, in northeastern China. He was 13 when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution and 15 when the chairman announced plans to send idle students “up to the mountains and down to the countryside.” Mao believed that the mobilization of young people would clear the cities of “troublemakers,” offer youth the collective wisdom of the peasantry and help build a proletariat paradise across vast stretches of rural China.
Millions of young Chinese responded, and at first Mr. Shan embraced the call. In September 1969, he boarded a train for Hohhot, a city on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia. It seemed, he recalls, “the most glorious day of my life.” Why would a 15-year-old run headlong to the Gobi? “We were not content,” Mr. Shan writes, “with watching all the action around us. We wanted to join the revolution as well.” Mr. Shan’s parents—his father was a customs official, his mother a secretary—were either supportive or powerless to say otherwise. The author says he was never quite sure.
So began a six-year odyssey for Mr. Shan, as a member of the Inner Mongolia Construction Army Corps. It didn’t take long for his enthusiasm to fade. His platoon passed long days laying bricks and nights keeping watch over frozen potato fields, and when word came of a possible Soviet invasion, the teenagers were ordered to crawl over manure-laden ground as part of their training. At times Mr. Shan and his friends were gripped by a hunger that drove them to “eat everything we could catch”—stray dogs and cats, insects, and, on one occasion, an owl.
Beyond the physical trauma, there was the soul-crushing experience of learning that the suffering was in the service of a flawed idea. Nearly every one of the corps’ projects failed, either in conception or execution or both. As for educating the peasants, that notion fell apart on first contact. “In truth,” writes Mr. Shan, “the peasants hated and feared us.”
Mr. Shan relates such episodes in a measured voice that adds to their power. Yet perhaps the most memorable moments in the book come when windows open for Mr. Shan and paths “out of the Gobi” emerge. Though he writes of his past with humility, it is clear that he possessed uncommon intelligence, resilience and an ability to seize any shred of opportunity. In late 1971 he learned of a fresh directive from Beijing: “Universities are still needed . . . [and] students should be selected from among workers and peasants who have practical experiences.” A flash of hope shot through him. “This, I realized, could be the miracle I had been hoping for.”
His next journey, to university in Beijing and ultimately to America, is told with flair and occasional humor. He tries everything—even taking up volleyball refereeing in Gobi, which he figures (correctly, it turns out) might boost his odds of a ticket out. Later, when a choice of American universities looms, there is a priceless exchange with a Chinese adviser. Three institutions are on offer. Stanford? “I’ve never heard of it,” the adviser tells him. “It must be an obscure school.” Berkeley? “The University of California must be pretty good, but this one apparently is a branch school.” The University of San Francisco? “I have heard so much about San Francisco,” the man says. “This one must be the best of these.” Three weeks later Mr. Shan was there.
Once in California, he marvels at hot showers and TV commercials and at the fact that residents with deer and squirrels in their backyards don’t go after them in pursuit of a meal. He also puzzles over a certain American epithet. In the Gobi, cow dung had been a precious commodity, a critical source of fuel. So why does a blunt English word for it carry such negative associations?
One drawback of “Out of the Gobi” is the relatively little time that Mr. Shan devotes to his later life. This man who never had a day of high school would earn advanced degrees in business from the University of San Francisco and that “branch school” at Berkeley, but more than three-quarters of the book is spent in the desert; the time in the U.S. is wonderfully drawn but brief. He writes only sparingly about the emotional toll of being separated from his wife, who initially remained in China, and of the birth of their first child and the struggle to bring them both to the U.S. His ascent in the world of high finance in China—begun with a job in Hong Kong in 1993—is relegated to a final paragraph.
How, one wonders, does today’s wild pace of change and growth in China look to a man who has suffered as Mr. Shan has and who now benefits from those changes? The author seems to anticipate the question. “How I got into playing high-stakes money games,” he writes in an epilogue, “is perhaps another story worth telling.” Indeed it is.
Mr. Nagorski is executive vice president of the Asia Society and the author of “Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack.”
I enjoyed your review as well and I wish I enjoyed the movie as much as you did. I am gonna "ahem" borrow it so that I can pass it off as mine to my nieces...