Da Chen's Colors Of The Mountain

In Marion Winiks review of “Colors of the Mountain”, he acknowledges Da Chen’s ability of sharing his bittersweet childhood. Most people who have gone through unpleasant times choose to keep their deepest secrets hidden, but Chen chooses otherwise. Winik uses excellent examples to support his argument. One example was when poor Da had no other choice but to eat moldy yams for a whole year. Imagine a child eating moldy meat that could potentially make them ill or worse die. Winik also acknowledges Das ability to represent characters with ought being bland, the fascination in his characters catches the audience’s attention. Chen describes everyone without sugar coating anything, even himself. I admire Winik because he understood Chen’s purpose of writing his memoir. He understood Das capability of leaving his readers wondering, after all is that not what makes for a delicious book? …show more content…
He claims to admire the author’s fluent writing while simultaneously stating the book had an inconsistent tone that changed as quickly as a kabuki scenery” (Caos). I for one cannot make sense of his comments, it seems as though he read the book with a closed mind. One minute he is degrading Chen’s memoir piece by piece, then the next he is praising it. He cannot seem to make up his mind on how he feels about the memoir. Cao also believes Chen’s characters have nothing special about them, they lack spunk and originality. He notes the characters laughing but that the readers had no insight of what they were laughing about. However, Cao failed to realize that readers don’t care about what was being laughed at, but that they were just happy the characters found some light through the darkness. The memoir was not meant to be perfect, it was the little imperfections that made it blunt and marvelous at the same