Listen to Green Apple Red Book: A Trial and Errors: A Memoir of a Chinese-American by Rebecca Li-Huang

Book Description

Green Apple Red Book portrays the American Dream and the Chinese Dream from the perspective of a first-generation Chinese-American born during the Cultural Revolution who came to America after the Tiananmen Square student protest. The book juxtaposes the story of two immigrant families caught in the crossfire of a real-life legal drama with the author's intimate narrative of searching for truth, love, and her own identity by trial and error. The American and Chinese systems of values and justice are in contrast, as the author shows the reversals of fortune and changes of fate and ambition in China and the U.S. through her journey. With a suburban life and worldly experience, Rebecca Li-Huang was a self-made American who had it all. Then, on her fortieth birthday, her world started to crumble. On the Great Wall of China, she received an unexpected call from the Chinese authorities. Upon her return home, she was thrown into a lawsuit that lasted years, culminating in a weeks-long trial in a Silicon Valley courtroom. Her trial was contemporaneous with a billion-dollar multinational corporate trial across the street and a murder trial in her college town in China; Her adversary was a woman who worked at Apple and appeared to have it all, even high blood sugar. Her only connection to the plaintiff was a man with degrees from elite universities who had vanished. The Kafkaesque trial spurred Rebecca to make a reckoning of her life. As she awaited the verdict, she deliberated over the paradox of wealth, class and privilege. The all-out trial provides an anchor for the author's life stories: from her childhood in the Cultural Revolution to her college years marked by the Tiananmen Square student protests and government crackdown; from her fending off bullies on the playground and navigating ruthless grade school classrooms to surviving a violent sexual assault on an elite college campus; from her "making it" as a have-not immigrant from a poor country to "having it all" as an upwardly mobile American with opportunities from the new economic powerhouse of China. With unflinching honesty, the author caricatures the excess of American individualism and Chinese collectivism, challenges the notion of success and having-it-all, and reveals the true cost of passing judgment.