Runaway - Softcover

Lau's journal, a best seller in her native Canada, is a brutally frank account of her life on the streets of Vancouver after running away from a traditional Chinese home at the age of 14. Her extremely repressive parents forbade Evelyn from creative writing, which was both her obsession and, later, the key to her survival: "Who am I if not a writer? It's all I have-this pile of crumpled paper that follows me everywhere in my backpack, words breathing life, my existence." Her chronicles of time spent in and out of social service and psychiatric care, recurrent drug usage, prostitution out of sheer desperation, plus several suicide attempts are told with unflinching honesty that perhaps could be conveyed only by an author that young. The abuse and humiliation she suffers, similar to that portrayed in Fresh Girls and Other Stories (LJ 2/95), is often difficult to digest. While the self-absorption of a depressed 14-year-old with adolescent ideas of grandiosity does get slightly repetitive, Lau's fervent devotion to her writing (throughout her ordeals she continued to keep her journal) and her naked desire to be loved strikes the reader with a touching poignancy. Recommended, especially for women's studies collections.
Marcie S. Zwaik, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.