Good God Gross!

My friend Annie sent me this story today from the United Kingdom's The Sun. It's the grossest thing I've read in a while and therefore, ripe to share!

Huang Yijun, a 92-year-old woman from Huangjiaotan, China, went into a hospital looking for a cure for her stomach aches. Doctors found that the cause of her pain wasn’t her stomach, but her womb.

In 1948, Huang discovered that her unborn child had died. Unable to afford the medical fees, Huang decided not to remove the fetus: "It was a huge sum at the time - more than the whole family earned in several years so I did nothing and ignored it." 60 years later, doctors are amazed at how little the body has decayed, and how well Huang has fared.

The thought of keeping a decaying fetus in my womb for 60 years makes me dry heave. I honestly can't believe this woman is still alive.

Factory Girls by Leslie Chang

So I finished Factory Girls yesterday. I was on a mission as I have another book from the library sitting on my night stand, beckoning me.

While I really liked Factory Girls I found the two narratives of the book didn't meld together into a cohesive unit. While the book was, in fact, about China's young migrant worker women, Chang also talked at length about her own ancestors in China and her families escape from the Cultural Revolution. I thought the book could have done without so much of Chang's families past as it had extremely loose ties to the main focus of the book. It was odd to read about Min's factory hopping to better her situation and then switch to reading about how Chang's grandfather was murdered by Communists at the Fushun Mine. Not enough of a parallel to read smoothly.

In any case, I appreciated the time Chang took to really get to know the young women she wrote about. She obviously went to great lengths to keep in touch with them and even visited one of their home villages. I can see why this book made the New York Times list of the top 100 books of 2008. It is expertly reported and well written.

Check out an excerpt from the book via NPR here.

Put this one on your "to read" list. Next up: What Happened to Anna K.: A Novel.

New Book

I did a little too much holiday partying and not enough reading this weekend but I did pick up this book from the public library and I can't wait to sink my eyes into it.

I found it on the New York Times list of the 100 top books of 2008. This is from the New Yorker:

China is in the midst of history's largest human migration, a hundred and thirty million of its citizens having left their home villages in search of urban employment. Chang, an American of Chinese descent, explores the migrant experience and the burden of being Chinese through the lives of several young women in the industrial city of Dongguan. Their Sisyphean attempts at self-reinvention are both entertaining and poignant; the most ambitious of them achieves modest success selling dubious health products, before falling under the spell of an American raw-food guru. In her diary, she reminds herself, "We can be ordinary but we must not be vulgar." Chang's fine prose and her keen sense of detail more than compensate for the occasional digression, and her book is an intimate portrait of a strange and hidden landscape, a universe of relentless motion.