Book review: My Private China, by Alex Kuo
Although in recent years the amount of literature about China has grown significantly, Alex Kuo's My Private China successfully sets itself apart from the rest.
Although in recent years the amount of literature about China has grown significantly, Alex Kuo's My Private China successfully sets itself apart from the rest.
Educated at Hong Kong's King George V school, then at the University of Iowa, Kuo is a writer (of both fiction and non-fiction), poet and documentary photographer.
While identity is one of the many recurring themes in My Private China, it also seems to be a theme of his life outside books.
Being born in Boston, raised in wartime Chongqing and having attended school in Hong Kong, Kuo - who won the American Book Award in 2002 with his compilation Lipstick and Other Stories - can be described as a "third-culture kid". And even though Kuo claims, in a previous interview with the Post, that he is not a Hong Kong writer, he often writes about the issues the city faces in My Private China.
As other books on China aim to discuss its economy, politics or the famous people it has produced, Kuo's collection of profiles, interviews, essays and poems breathes life into his personal accounts of the mainland.