The book follows a 16-year-old Chinese girl called Yanyan in 1921, who always wanted to become a doctor. To achieve her dream she leaves not only her family, country and the surroundings she's comfortable in, but also her first love Liang, a Manchurian rebel, behind to study medical science in Ithaca, New York. That's a quite unusual decision to make for a young woman in that time, so she has to deal with different problems during her stay in America such as racism and sexism.
I can't even tell you how much I love this book. I got it about four or five yearsago, read it several times since then and enjoyed it so much every time I picked it up. The writing isn't even that good (don't get me wrong, it's not bad, just nothing special), but the story is fantastic. First of all, I really liked reading about characters with Asian background in a historical fiction novel since I know nearly nothing about historical Asia (thanks to the german history classes which only focus on Germany, Europe and sometimes America). The main character Yanyan is simply amazing. She's such a strong and independent young woman, she's able to defend herself (she knows some kung fu moves, so she's badass as well) and fight for her dreams. She encouraged me so much to take the classes I'm really interested in, even though it meant to be seperated from most of my friends. Sadly its still rather unusual for girls to work in technical jobs and it's sometimes really hard to be only surrounded by boys, but I'm really glad I made the decision to take chemistry and physic and I'm not sure I'd been confident enough to make it if I hadn't read this book.
Rating: 4.5/5 ✹
So you should definitely pick this book up if you're into historical fiction because it's a really short book with a so beautiful, touching and inspiring story. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do!
Leah
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