womens studies

After personally meeting the author at a family gathering, I was inspired to purchase the book. Once I started reading, I could not put it down. The story was amazing and just unfolded before your eyes. The descriptions of the scenery, the characters and such were so vivid and clear that you could easily put yourself in the scene and experience what they characters were experiencing. This book really opened my eyes up to the Chinese culture and gaining a better understanding and insight into the old times and new times of the Chinese culture.
This was very well written and I just finished it last night. The book cover was wonderful, very beautiful. Irene and David did a wonderful job and look forward to hearing more reviews about this wonderful book.

To read the Golden Mountain is to be immersed in the Chinese culture, as seen through women's experience over a span of four generations. One feels the limitations, the consequences that follow from accepting spoken and unspoken traditions, and how this carries forward into the present. Though the outlook was bleak, the author has taken me with her on a journey, armed with an indomitable will, a sense of spirit and inner truth, to freedom.
I found this book fascinating on many levels.

Although it may seem the Golden Mountain is a "woman's book", I found it inspiring from a man's point of view. In its essense the book is about finding the courage to speak the truth to yourself and to the world about yourself, about your life. There was no sugar coating of even the most intimate details of her relationships. This to me is the greatest expression moral courage. The book is an antidote to denial. Its honesty is sometimes breathtaking.

I was also inspire by the radical transformation she underwent as a person. Her first forty odd years were spent in some way under someone elses control -- her mother, the men in her life, the expectations of her chinese heritage. She clear connected with a resevoir of strength and will deep within her that said she had a choice between freedom and suffocation. She chose freedom.