From My Bookshelf ~ by Lynn Willoughby: Featuring The Concubine's Daughter

What do you know about Kung Fu?


Cutting for Stone ~ Abraham Verghese
This novel begins prior to the birth of conjoined twins Shiva and Marion. It is a complicated storyline-especially at the beginning.
Their parents have an illicit, years in the making, romance. The mother is a beautiful Indian nun - Sister Mary Praise; their father, Tomas Stone, is a brilliant British surgeon. They are both working in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at Missing Hospital (a misprint of Mission Hospital). The boys' mother dies while giving birth and their father disappears shortly after. They are raised by Hema and Ghosh, two Indian doctors who also work at Missing.
Marion and Shiva come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution and their lives are intertwined with the nation's politics. The nation is both bolstered and trapped by it's notorious emperor Haile Selassie. When Mengistu comes to power, Marion is forced to flee to America.
The ancient world, with all its flavours, scents and sounds is an intriguing part of this book, as are the ever mysterious characters from a wide variety of races. The surprising and stunning conclusion draws together all the threads of love and betrayal, life and death, forgiveness and self-sacrifice and the wondrous return of favours and compassion.
It is a long, intricate book that took me awhile to read as I picked it up and put it down more than once. The final third of the book kept me turning pages and I was glad I finished this very original piece of writing. There are a lot of medical practices, vocabulary and procedures in this novel - including female circumcision, fistulas and liver transplants. There is also a wealth of information, including the precise details of surgery - in primitive settings in Ethiopia, poor hospitals in the United States and state of the art hospitals in Boston. Surgery, nature and circumstance are the encompassing themes.

The Concubine's Daughter ~ Pai Kit Fai
This is a meandering tale of three generations of women, covering a small chunk of Chinese history, culture, politics and customs from 1906 to 1940.
The beauty of 'Lotus Feet", silk farming and the harvesting of silk, the pattern of adoring male children and trading girls as though they have no more value than a kitten, the opium trade, Chinese medicine and martial arts - all these themes and more are part of this complex novel.
So how do the two main heroines - Li-Xia and her daughter, Su Sing, survive? This book is almost like two parallel stories, for not only do they survive, they both become scholars - an ambition usually reserved for boys.
This book is long and wordy, but there were many parts that really pulled me in - life on the silk farm, the opium sub-culture and life in early twentieth century Hong Kong and Macao. I have read books on that time in China that I liked better, but this had a lot of foreign history and culture and I enjoyed it for that, even though I felt disconnected from both protagonists.
Red Lotus

Who Knew?
Kung Fu was originally practiced only by the military. Their need for self-defense, hunting techniques and survival training in ancient China was brutal. In 509 BC Confucius suggested that people outside the military, including religious sects, should practice martial arts and all should study literary arts. Since then, the variety of strikes, throws, pressure point attacks, joint manipulation and weaponless fighting have resulted in the variety of martial arts we know today.