Mulberry Child: A Memoir of China - Softcover

Jian Ping was born and raised in China. She came to the U.S. to pursue her graduate studies in the mid 1980s. Her other publications include A Fool's Paradise (Xiwang Publishing, China, 1984), a collection of translated short stories by Isaac B. Singer, and Chinese Film Theory (Praeger, New York, 1989). Her latest book Mulberry Child: A Memoir of China tells the story of her coming of age and her family's traumatic experiences during the Cultural Revolution. It is being developed into a docu-drama film by award-winning director Susan Morgan Cooper (Director of An Unlikely Weapon: the Eddie Adams Story).

Jian Ping worked for China Film as a translator for four years in Beijing before coming to the U.S. and worked at Crown Imports, the largest beer importer in the U.S. for twenty years. She held various positions during her tenure at Crown, with the most recent as National Director of Tsingtao Beer, the best known consumer product exported from China. Now, she is President of MoraQuest, a consulting firm specializing in bridging cultural differences between the East and West. She also gives speeches at business organizations and universities on issues related to China, women's leadership, and writing.

Jian Ping was featured on Chicago Tonight Show at WTTW and the Asian American Network News in 2008. She has had more than 30 radio and newspaper interviews in recent months and reviews on Mulberry Child: A Memoir of China have appeared in World Journal, Tsing Tao News, the Chinese Daily, Asian Fortune News, Fairfield Citizen, the Courier Journal, and NPR (VA). Jian is a columnist for Asian Wisconzine and has published more than 15 articles in magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and China. She held a Ragdale residency and was a recipient of the Florence Bear Picker Fellowship from the Radgale Foundation. Jian is working on her next book in collaboration with her daughter Lisa and the title of the book is From Changchun to Chicago: A Mother and Daughter's Journey.

Jian Ping's book Mulberry Child is a moving account of her family's struggle to survive China's Cultural Revolution. She has in her poignant memoir helped Westerners to understand this little-known period in China's history, and put tragic and heroic faces to the individuals who suffered through that time. Mulberry Child is important reading for anyone who wants to understand where modern China has come from. --Rob Gifford, former Beijing Correspondent of NPR, and author of China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power

Jian Ping's poignant and compelling tale of growing up in China during the difficult times of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution is an important addition to "scar literature" published in the West about events and people and victims forgotten, buried or silenced by the mainland Chinese and their government over the past four decades. The author shows convincingly how the fortunes and misfortunes of the past shape, inform, educate and haunt each of us. Jian Ping pays tribute to her parents who struggled against tremendous odds in order to realize their own small dreams; that she herself survived to write this memoir, and to tell it with such maturity and wisdom and forgiveness, is a tribute to her family, her generation and her nation. In an unforgettable parting from her parents she recalls she could not find the right words to express her deep feelings of sorrow. Now, at long last, is this memoir, she has found them and blessed not only her parents but each of her readers, too. --Larry Engelmann, author of Feather in a Storm and Daughter of China

In Mulberry Child, Jian Ping has written a moving, important account of an extraordinary time. And she has done so with grace, acuity and a generosity of spirit. Mulberry Child is one compelling read. --Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Were No Children Here

Jian Ping is neither a journalist nor an historian, yet in her book Mulberry Child, she has managed to combine the skills of both of those professions. She combines the journalist's gift of observation and skillful writing with the historian's eye for detail. The result is a riveting book that ushers the reader to the front row of history as it tells the story of one of China's most turbulent eras through the often tragic, sometimes uplifting but always true experiences of one family--or more accurately, through the perceptive eyes of a girl growing up in 1960s China. Jian Ping is a terrific story teller who writes with both power and precision. --Ronald E. Yates, Dean of the College of Media at the University of Illinois and former foreign correspondent and author based in Asia

I found this a fascinating and moving story about a child surviving in turbulent times. It is also a touching portrayal of the love that binds a close-knit family whatever the political ideology. Jian Ping's family is a compelling glimpse of the resilience inside a closed and mysterious society about which Americans know little and only now are beginning to learn. --Sharon Stangenes, Former Chicago Tribune Columnist