Black Country to Red China by Esther Cheo Ying Vintage, HK$113

The wonder isn't that there are so many 'China did this to me' books - Falling Leaves; Wild Swans; Socialism is Great! - but so few, at least in translation. There must be thousands of survivors of 20th-century China's turmoil with a worthwhile story to tell, and if they need a model then Esther Cheo Ying's is difficult to beat. Relating how she was born in China in 1932, brought up in the English Midlands and returned to China in 1949, idealistic, a future Red Army major and full of hope for her reborn homeland, Ying injects passion and humour into her vivid, sometimes appalling recollections. Witness the squalid, dangerous passage through the Taiwan Strait, where Nationalists were known to attack Communist ships and throw revolutionaries to the sharks; and her colleagues' 'personal remoulding', which arrived with rabid self-criticism sessions. Ying became a party cadre; and having worked as an announcer at the Hsinhua News Agency then served as an interpreter, thanks to her facility with English. But at the nub of Ying's memoir is an identity crisis. This 'ignorant English girl living as a Chinese' had, in the end, to choose a country. Which of the two would it be?