Monsoon Season: An Autobiography

By William Q. Wu

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1885854013
• ISBN13: 9781885854018
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Unistar Pub.
• Length: 261 Pages

Customer Reviews

This is an extraordinary life story of someone not famous.

William F. Wu, the author's son and a novelist and short story writer. Monsoon Season tells an extraordinary life story of someone who is not a public figure. He's neither an entertainer nor a politician. He is, however, one of those people in the generation now being recognized as "the greatest" in numerous books and magazines. He's also my father. This autobiography, with a foreword by former U.S. Ambassador to China Leonard Woodcock, recounts the varied experiences in my father's life. Born in a Chinese peasant village, he first learned of the United States from his grandfather, after a monsoon had passed; as a child, he left his mother and father to journey to Philadelphia, where he lived with an uncle in Chinatown, working in a restaurant and attending school. A simple summary of events here, however, does not do justice to his experience. Maybe a better way to convey the strength of this book would be to describe a few high points: A shipboard romance during a trip back to China in 1935, with a woman whose parents had arranged a marriage to someone else for her; his volunteering for the U.S. Army as a surgeon in a field hospital staffed in large part by Chinese American doctors and dentists, and his campaign experiences against the Japanese in the China-Burma-India theater; his diagnosing his wife's mysterious illness shortly after their marriage and a years-long struggle to save her life. He then attempted to start his private practice in Kansas City, Missouri, at a time when only white doctors were allowed into the local medical society; he became a test case for their policy. This book does not have the glamour of celebrity biographies, with famous names on every page; rather, it's an account of a real life, with a happy, triumphant conclusion.