`To understand everything is to pardon everything'

This, then, is a book that is ideal for school libraries. If I was in charge of a high-school library in Taiwan, or indeed anywhere where there were students with links with China, I'd order two or three copies. It's easy to read, combines clearly-expressed emotions with a strong story line, and deals with important issues relating to questions of ethnic origin, as well as China's recent history, clearly and honestly.

Adults are going to look at the story a little differently. They might regard it as just a touch too simple. The difference between an adult's viewpoint and that of a teenager, it could be argued, is that adults see the ironies and complexities within human relationships. Ye Ting-xing must know this better than most. When she left China for Canada she had to leave behind her Chinese husband and her five-year old daughter.

Any remorse that this entailed can't have been a simple thing to handle. This isn't something dealt with in this book. Instead, it imagines an altogther clearer-cut, emotionally simpler, situation. But anyone who's read A Leaf in the Bitter Wind might find himself asking whether the author herself has a lost daughter somewhere hidden away in her own

psychological closet.

These thoughts are not meant to detract from the virtues of this unassuming, yet in its own way sturdy, fictional work. Its qualities, as I've said, are its directness and its even-handed sympathy for all involved. There are no out-and-out villains in this story, just as there are few areas of ambiguities and few mixed motives. Its moral could be said to be that you only have to look at life from other people's points of view to understand their actions. To understand everything is to pardon everything, as the French say.

In actual fact the story does become more complex once Dong-mei is in China. Everything is far from a bed of roses there, and her arrival is met by some with mixed feelings. Even so, the complexities imposed by history aren't allowed to dominate the plot development. There's instead just sufficient resentment and truculence to make the story credible. Even an adolescent readership, after all, can have a quite astute sense of what the adult world is really like.