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DAUGHER OF THE YELLOW RIVER – BY DIANA LU –BOOK REVIEW by Peter Phelps 10/19/12

I would rate this book five stars out of five. It is part autobiography and part self-help/business advice.

For a book I picked up at the Dollar Tree it was definitely one that would have been worth the full cover

price.

OK. Yes this is another one of those Chinese culture type books. I guess I continue to read them in an

attempt to understand this big country across the ocean that sells us all our goods and has such an

impact on our own culture. Also, I suppose that I hope to understand enough to do more than just visit.

The author was one of the families displaced during the Cultural Revolution due to the fact that her

father was considered an intellectual. For their “re-education” her parents were sent to work in a coal

mining town. They went from being fairly well off to living in a small rickety house where as a child the

author and her two siblings would be locked up with the chickens during the day while their parents

were at work. It took a change of leadership and switch in economic policies after Deng Xiaoping took

over the party leadership that led to her family moving back out of the poverty of the coal mining town

to positions at Chenzhou University. They had a small apartment where she would share a bed with her

brother and sister.

She talked about how she was glad for her mother to have had a boy on the third try due to the societal

pressures and how her grandmother practically ignored the girls, but their brother could do no wrong.

She felt that her mother had been spared the attempt to keep trying for a male heir. In those days only

the male could inherit from their father’s estate. 

The author would find that she was very good at picking up languages. She learned English on her own

from a television one of the families in the university had. She would delight in attempting to make

contact with other “foreign devils” to practice what she had learned. One of her strategies later for

learning a language would be that you had to attempt to take every opportunity to speak it with others.

Her abilities with language would pay off greatly in her future.

In some ways I both grieve for and envy the Chinese student. Along their path are many exams which

will decide their future academic and career choices. (I grieve because they have to be some of the most

stressed-out people and there is a tremendous amount of pressure to succeed for the honor or the

family. This pressure is added because there is no national retirement system to aid in taking care of the

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elderly, just the support from the children mandated by lay. This forces the families to push their

children to excel so they can achieve a high material and social standing for the good of the family. I am

envious because I have always been good at tests and if it were so easy here I would have my master’s

degree for sure. ) Diana took the exams after the completion of their equivalent of high school. She said

she was very nervous and had always been plagued by this apprehension while taking exams. She

accidentally skipped a couple of pages because she thought they were extra credit during the three day

long testing session. This caused her to have a lower score than she or her family had hoped for.

Diana was placed into the medical program in the university next to the one her parents worked at. She

knew her talents were no match for the program and tried to quit, but her parents would not allow that

since as a doctor she would have a good job when she completed it. She really was not cut out to

become a doctor. She would throw up when they dissected a cadaver and fainted anytime she had to

witness brain surgery (she said she couldn’t stand the thought they were drilling into someone’s skull).

During these years she would excel in her sports and singing as things to take her mind off her misery.

She was glad when she and her classmates finally graduated because she had been offered a job

teaching English back at her parents’ university many years before. She was crushed to learn that the

school had changed Deans and that the job had already been filled. She refused her appointed doctor

position and because of this created a rift with her mother that made it impossible for her to stay at

home.

I am going to skip a bit, but you basically have to say that she was extremely brave to defy her parents.

Fealty to your parents was one of the big Confucian teachings and this independent streak went against

all her societal norms. She followed a boy to Shenzhen where they did not get back together due to herfinding a good job at a hotel while he was too embarrassed because he had not obtained work. She

would spend a great deal of time working at that international hotel, but when she requested a transfer

into another department she was denied and she soon left the position to find a place that would

appreciate her skills. She was basically homeless for many months while she stayed at friends’

apartments and looked for work in job markets. She was given a huge opportunity to work for a

company that was doing real estate prospecting and traveled widely around the country researching

properties to invest in, but later the market went flat and she found herself sitting around the office

with little to do. She left that position and moved to one working as the office manager for Drexel, a

fiber optics company. Most of these positions were a result of her skills with English and she would

constantly be commented on how she had very little accent plus her determination to succeed.

While on a trip to America for the company she bumped into Jon. She and Jon fell in love and decided to

get married after months of talking on the phone and a vacation trip to visit New York. Diana returned

to China to get her affairs in order. She and Jon had discussed forging a business partnership and

starting their own company. He even registered the company name as a gift while she was still in China.

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When she made it back to the United States Jon’s company had decided to relocate him to their office in

California. She found that Jon had made no plans at all for their wedding and was so busy with the move

that he would become frustrated and argumentative whenever she would attempt to get him to assist

in its preparation. Finally, he suggested they just get the wedding over with by going to a court judge.

This little ceremony was not the dream wedding that she had imagined and she was very disappointed

because on the vacation visit before they had attended one of his family member’s weddings which was

one of the more lavish types. Jon bought a house in Santa Cruz, but he barely spent any time except to

sleep there as the company had him working twelve hour shifts. Sitting around the house being just a

house wife and in surroundings with no friends drove Diana a bit stir crazy. When she realized that Jon

was not going to help her out with their dream business because he felt it was too risky she began the

task on her own. He of course complained about some of the costs and they argued often. Diana would

stay in this loveless marriage for a long time because it helped to keep men from attempting any

requests for sexual favors. This had been one problem she kept running into when she was working in

Shenzhen and she had quit several jobs due to this issue. Later she would form her own business so that

her efforts were her own and not to be shared with Jon. She finally filed for a divorce once the company

was well established. ATI was the name of the company and its beginning was to just set up orders from

Chinese telecoms, mostly cable TV companies, and filling them with Western made fiber optic cable.

One of the companies in particular was Corning and she traveled to a conference just to speak to one of 

the executives to ensure that her clients would receive the product on time. It was at this meeting that

she was approached by a Chinese fiber optics cable maker called YOFC which was a joint venture

between the government and a Dutch firm. She originally turned YOFC down flatly because she did not

think that a domestically manufactured cable would be able to compete in quality with the Western

made products.

Later, after many months of attempts by YOFC and research, she would reverse this decision. Experts

had stated that they thought the product was able to provide competitive quality. ATI signed a three

year exclusive sales agreement with YOFC for all of China. Diana was able to quickly take this unknown

company and market its products to form deals, but about a year into the contract trouble started to

appear. The company started shorting the clients and quit paying the commissions on time. At one point

she was so frustrated that she asked her clients to project and purchase a year in advance. The clients

complied, but then the company stated that they would not sell to them as they did not have the

capacity. This ruined her reputation with the clients and she lost a lot of money. On a business trip to

discuss possibly merging the fiber optics section of the business with another company she met and

ended up falling for a Canadian. Sadly, the distance ended up causing that relationship to fall apart.

She had been smart enough to diversify ATI’s offerings to include more than just fiber optics into OEM

telecom products. At the age of 34 she sold off most of the business and retired. She bought her own

house in Santa Cruz and later a place in San Francisco which would become her home. She filed suit

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around four buildings, watching cameras and clicking a mouse to acknowledge some BS alarms can’t be

it. I didn’t study for so many years to achieve just some paper certifications or degrees.

I keep trying to brainstorm my passions, but lately they feel flat or burned out. Transformers were once

my big thing, but I sold those all off and swore I’d only buy them again if it was as gifts or for my own

kids. Perhaps it may have been a mistake to have sold off the collection, but at the time I thought I was

trading one thing I love for someone to love. Then there was my passion for computers in general.

Maybe after too many times that I tried to break into the field; once after earning the A+ and MCSE

certifications, and again after earning my Bachelor’s, I felt disappointed and the excitement of being

able to do something with them faded. In the last year I haven’t even read a computer magazine. The

other day I went to buy one and had sticker shock when I saw the cheapest one was eight dollars! I

looked in the toy isle and the new Fall of Cybertron Transformers toys were $15.49 each for a toy that I

could not see paying $8 for. Maybe those passions are too expensive. LOL. Of course, there are places

with online picture galleries of the toys so I can still draw them if I so choose without spending a cent.

Perhaps that is also why the magazines have become so costly since we could really find articles online

too that don’t cost a cent. I keep wondering why we don’t see more publishing houses move their

printing overseas where it can be done for less cost. Sadly, I think it’s too late for that as eBook readers

are becoming commonplace and tablets are quickly replacing laptops as the portable computing device

of choice. When I was out of work before the current job I was thinking I would start a web site that sold

tablets and their accessories. I was going to even call it Tablet Topia, but today the concept would not fly

because there are too many retailers selling them from Kmart to your local cell phone dealer.

So where do I go from here? Right now I am still concentrating on a near-sighted approach. Work haskept me busy with too much overtime, but it has been good because I can pay off some debt faster. The

sooner it is off my plate the better. Perhaps then I can start to have some fun again and explore more of 

what I would like to do with the rest of my time here on this occurrence of life. I’ll admit that I would like

to look back and say, “Yes, I made a difference.”