There's a lot about this book that is excellent, but by page 400 out of 597, I was tired of it. Partly it is because I neither like nor dislike Alice, although I admire her capabilities, but that's along time to spend with her. Not even the Siege of the International Legations stirred much interest.

The best part is the apparent erudition of the author, who seems to know her Chinese history and culture very well. I'm somewhat familiar with the period, so I didn't learn a great deal, but it was very well presented.

Alice Greenwood is about 12 at the time on the Tientsin (Tianjin) Church Massacre, which began as a protest against Catholic nuns who were rumored to be kidnapping children and baptizing them as Christians. It spilled over onto Christian missions in general, including the Greenwood's. Alice and her younger brother Frank are dragged off to Hunan to serve as hostages, a trip of about 600 miles or almost 1,500 km in a cart with minimal food, and then confined by the Chu family in a kitchen courtyard storage room, again with little food or protection against the weather. After it becomes clear that they cannot be traded for the life of a Chu relative, Eldest son is eager to kill them, but his father instead has them absorbed into the household as slaves. Two of the younger Chu children befriend the Greenwoods. Alice becomes Mei's personal servant, studies with her, and then, in addition, an unofficial and very willing concubine to her father. Frank is placed in the stable, where he becomes a groom and friend to Han-li. The Greenwoods seem to have forgiven, and almost forgotten, their past miseries.

In some ways this is believable. I'm certain that most readers have heard of the Stockholm Syndrome, Barr comments that the little niche in Mei's quarters pleases her more than any other room that she will see in her life. After the horrors of living in the storage shed, she is now warm, dry, and well-fed. One can see how she could be overwhelmed with gratitude to Mei. Mei's father is apparently a skilled lover, and in a graphic scene where they are trying out various sex positions, shows phenomenal stamina, and Alice longs to be summoned to bed by him. When he leaves the household in the charge of his older son, who wanted to kill the children, Alice is thrown out, and with another slave, makes her way east and finds her family - not an entirely happy reunion. A few years later, she and Frank are reminiscing about what a beloved home they had at the Chus'. I felt a bit ill.

This view of the Chus spends relies too much on particulars to make a general point, which I'm pretty sure that Barr meant to do. Suppose that the Greenwoods hadn't been befriended by the younger Chus. Suppose that the older Chu had found Alice as unattractive as the others thought he should. Then the Greenwoods would have remained low status even among the servants, and might have ended up fleeing when Elder Son was running the household and threw them out.

As the reader, I was not influenced by being a captive or a slave of love, and I was often at odds with how Alice, and presumably the author wanted me to view the Chus. At one point, it occurs to Alice that the house is a prison for the Chu women, who have bound feet and seldom leave the family home. Yet she later nostagically imagines them sitting in their beautiful garden embroidering. I suppose that this is supposed to be offset by her lackluster interest in ending foot-binding. In the end, the Chus represent a glorious civilization unwilling or unable to recognize the need for reforms to deal with the new world that is thrust upon them.

If the Chus wanted to use the children as hostages, I would have thought that they would have treated them better in the beginning - hostages that have died from malnutrition and exposure aren't of much use. I also began to marvel at how much Alice learned in the 3 to 4 years of her schooling. She speaks and is literate in both the Hunanese and Mandarin dialects, and has committed an enormous amount of poetry to memory.

Alice enters into what becomes an unhappy marriage, runs a business on her own, takes a Chinese lover, and becomes involved in Chines reform politics. She suffers through the slaughter at Port Arthur during the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895 (her presence was a bit contrived) and the Siege of the International Legations. She spends most of her adulthood among the Europeans in China, and seems to find them quite inferior. She attends a party and leaves early after being disgusted with the body mass, clothing, and disgusting European dancing. She scorns them as nobodies who wouldn't be able to live as luxuriously at home as they do in the international community in China --unlike the Chus who presumably deserve to live in luxury. Barr admits to a few flaws in traditional Chinese culture, especially for upper class women, but on the whole, I don't think that she quite achieves the balance that she is trying for. I began to wonder why Alice didn't make a greater effort to set herself up as "Chinese Alice" indeed, a colorful grand eccentric, and live more independently of the Europeans.

Yes, the Europeans were invaders, just as the Chinese were when they conquered the Uighurs of Sinkiang. Everyone wants to assert that the natural, god-ordained borders of their country are those they occupied at the height of their power and empire-building, and want to start history at a point when they look particularly sympathetic. Someone I know loved to tell me about how my ancestors (using the word in a very broad sense) persecuted her ancestors. After a couple of decades of this, I pointed out what she already knew -- unfortunately, it is true that my ancestors persecuted hers. It is equally true that her ancestors persecuted mine, and the pair of them persecuted other people. There are very few clean hands. It is not that two wrongs make a right, but rather of not clumsily trying to set up villians and heroes. ( )