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American
Visa
Reviews
A New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age
Ms. Magazine:
"In describing Seaweed's harsh experiences during the Cultural Revolution and her struggles in the U.S., Wang creates an intimate, compelling testimony."
International Examiner:
"No philosophy, analysis, or didactic moralism—just great, bare-boned storytelling."
Poetry Project Newsletter:
"Wang Ping's writing fulfills a new Chinese American style."
Asian Week:
"An insider's look into a girl's life growing up in a country in chaos. Detailed, lyrical and entrancing."
Belles Lettres:
"A remarkable, intimate collection of short stories that portray life after the Cultural Revolution in China. . . . Realizations of what we take for granted—intellectual freedom, choices determined by desire, not by habit or custom—come as amazing revelations."
Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly:
"Fiction must be more consistent, must make more sense than truth, and, in this case, it does. . . . Wang Ping's style is smooth, simple, direct and intensely personal."
Niko:
"Dramatically depict[s] life during the Mao years."
Kirkus Reviews:
"Wang uses the first-person voice of a young woman named Seaweed to tell of the depredations of the People's Revolution. . . . She has mastered a conversational tone that seems graceful and effortless."
School Library Journal:
"Seaweed [is] a character whom YA readers can easily admire and respect."
The APALA Bookshelf (Asian Pacific American Library Association):
"Wang Ping's writing is unsentimental, sometimes even devastating, yet so compelling as to mesmerize the reader. In some ways reminiscent of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, nevertheless this is no poor second but a brilliant and intriguing work of literature."
Kliatt:
"Provide[s] young American readers with a glimpse into a world quite unlike their own. The book could be used in the study of short stories, multicultural literature, international literature, and the relationships between mothers and daughters."
Mary Morris:
"In these moving, heartrending stories, told with amazing honesty, Wang Ping has captured the immigrant Chinese experience. Seaweed's journey from the emotional and intellectual wasteland of China during the Cultural Revolution to the anonymity and despair of New York is truly memorable. Wang takes her character's dreams and delusions and renders them with warmth and humor."
Colin MacCabe, The British Film Institute:
"American Visa is an astonishing piece of writing. Its direct unsentimental prose offers a portrait of Chinese family life and what it means to be a woman in China. As Seaweed moves from home, to a peasant village, to New York, we are moved by this record of suffering and persistence, of the desperate desire to move beyond the family and yet remain within it."
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