Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82454 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Big Issue Wales
`beautifully descriptive and poignant prose'

Observer, Tom Chatfield
`Xinran evokes the multiple, layered cultures and customs of modern China'.

Metro
'Xinran's writing...has offered a window to Westerners on to
Chinese culture and society...Miss Chopsticks...heartwarming.'

Customer Reviews

Village women getting used to the city in today's China
This novel gives a very different view of today's China than you normally see. Set in modern China, it tells how three young women called Three, Five and Six come from a tiny village to the city of [[Nanjing]].

Events are quite ordinary, shopping and food and work and small confusions, but it gives you a strong feeling for the unfamiliar social values. But you are given a vivid picture of a fast-changing society.

You also see the weak position of women, especially in the villages. The young women's names reflect their birth-order in a family of six girls, and they have no other names.

Books end and we can't see beyond their final sentences.
Miss Chopsticks tells the story of three sisters born into a family with no sons in a poor village in a province of northern China. Because of the shame compounded by their mother's inability to 'lay eggs' and their uselessness as daughters, the girls aren't given names but numbers. Women are like chopsticks, their father tells them; easily broken. A son, however, is the roof beam that holds up the house. After the two eldest sisters are sent off to marry men they neither love nor like (and after one sister kills herself rather than tarnish the family's good name), sisters Three, Five and Six leave the village for the city of Nanjing to carve their lot in life.

Perhaps this book doesn't have the most fast paced, accelerated and captivating of plots, but it is as true to the events portrayed as can be. Xinran interviewed these women before writing the book and, while they may not have been sisters in reality, their stories still deserve to be told and their lives still say something about the situation of women, their struggles and their rewards. I enjoyed it and I'm looking to pick up Xinran's Good Women of China next.

Roof-beams and Chopsticks
Miss Chopsticks is a lovely book about three sisters named Three, Five and Six, who leave their home in the country to work in the big city. Their names are actually the order in which the girls were born, their father being so disappointed at not having a son, that he never gave them real names.

The title of the book refers to the way the Chinese view the difference between men and women. Men are referred to as roofbeams because they are 'strong providers who hold up the roof of the household', whereas women are chopsticks, 'fragile, workaday tools, to be used and discarded'.

The author, in her work as a journalist, encountered many 'chopstick' girls who she said 'lived lives of drudgery in arranged marriages'. However, as the economy changed in the 1980's these 'chopstick' girls moved to the city and found work as waitresses and cleaners, in restaurants, shops and hotels, so 'becoming part of the structure that holds up the roof of China'.

Miss Chopsticks is the fictional tale of three sisters, working in Nanjing, who as I read, I willed to do well in their new lives and prove their worth. In real life the girls are not related - the author has written them as sisters in order to protect their identity. However their stories are true and the girls the ones who most touched the authors heart.