SOURCE: "Freedom Writer," in Chicago, Vol. 43, January, 1994, pp. 55-7, 112-14.

[In the following review, based in part on a conversation with Min, Mesic discusses Min's first years in the United States and her struggle to deal with the brutality she endured in China.]

Nine years ago a young woman named Anchee Min left mainland China to come to Chicago. She was 26 years old, had never flown before, spoke no English, and was weak from being compelled to do menial work despite recurrent, untreated bouts of pneumonia—an informal punishment for wanting to emigrate. Yet as the plane began its descent, the lights along the lake were so dazzling—"In Chinese cities there are not lights like these at night," she explains—that she thought of her father's passion for astronomy and his fantasy of flying to the stars. "Is this heaven?" she wondered. "Is this a different planet...