Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi is free-wheeling, unusual, and always charged as it swings back and forth in time and cultures. These are mountain and river tales wound together like eels navigating the muddy waters of political, cultural, and personal displacement and wars waged against the human spirit. Episodes wriggle between cities on either side of the Pacific, China to the United States and back again, from Tiger Leaping Gorge to New York, to Tibet, to the Yangtze and the Mississippi. Between the trapped and the free as the writer swims between homes and two rivers simultaneously.

—Gretel Ehrlich

A wry, distinctive voice animates Wang Ping’s stories. She melds the autobiographical with the informative and comes up with a unified hybrid. . . . She portrays her family members and neighbors as vividly as Charles Dickens. . . . In one story, she discovers that a girl in the neighborhood had spent the cold night out of doors, reading Hans Christian Andersen disguised by the cover of Chairman Mao’s collected sayings. Typical of Ping’s lyrical sensibility, one registers this as a reflection of the revolution’s tyranny, yet one is also shown a fittingly fable-like image of the girl seated beneath a streetlight, ‘her hair and shoulders covered with frost.’ Perhaps most astonishing was Ping’s ‘Chinese Toilet,’ in which appear latrines, cuspidors, porcelain chamber pots and, luxury of luxuries, the private toilet. How many writers have the skill to take a potentially distasteful subject and turn it into an intelligent, engaging, and sometimes riotous study of an entire culture in the midst of upheaval? This writer can—with great success.

—Bernard Cooper, author of My Avant-Garde Education: A Memoir