Reader comments
Thousand Pieces of Gold

I very much enjoyed this film and reviewed it at
www.epinions.com under FRWHISKEY as a screenname. However,
my point in a short comment: the real book is much more
accurate telling of the horrendous conditions and anti-
female problems of China in getting Lalu on a ship to San
Francisco at all.

Her father and mother did not want to sell her, but they
risked planting winter wheat with the savings they had.
They lost all their savings with excess rain that winter,
then went through years of very hard and hungry days. She
would have been sold at 13, but she begged for the chance
to earn her keep by becoming a farmer alongside her
father. At first this would not even be considered since
her feet were bound, making such work too difficult. They
unbound her bent feet and she walked with a wobble the rest
of her life, yet off she went to the fields and became a
good, strong farmer for five years. At age 18, when her
reputation as "old and unmarriageable" because of her
unbound feet and unconventional work became a concern for
her parents, their small hordings of food were stolen by
bandits, former migrant workers whose own families had
starved to death, not just suffered from hunger, but died.
The men became rapacious and stole from those whom they had
once worked for, knowing every nook and cranny of their
properties, where food could be hidden (including the
privy, i.e. yes, in the "manure" itself). The family knows
that the bandits are coming and hide in the privy. The
head bandit, their own former hired hand, demands this
daughter, and pays two bags of soybean seed. She's hauled
off with these bandits, who draw lots to sleep with her in
order (about 50 of them). Then they decide not to "defile"
her because they can sell a virgin for a higher price.
Meanwhile, bands of soldiers are on the loose trying to get
these bandits. She would be worse off in the rape
department with them, so the bandits manage to hide her,
get her down to Shanghai and sell her for 15,000 yuan. The
madame who hires her sees her dark skin and dragonboat
feet, but has a buyer immediately at hand, a man in America
who will get money out of her through prostitution.

I only mention these initial parts of the real story
because the movie completely glosses over them. The
atrocities commited against women in China, treating them
as chattel, goes back for thousands of years. WHen a movie
director glosses over the brutal realities she suffered at
her own people's hands, her treatment in a mining camp in
Idaho almost looks civilized, since there are concepts of
personal worth even for women. Slavery is ILLEGAL!!! Yow!

China is too skimmed over in this film for any of various
reasons, but those interested in the real reason women were
smuggled in, illegally of course, to the USA, as sex slaves
primarily, should read the book. Only by widespread
exposure of these crimes against women can China's shame be
brought to the world stage and be stoned to death. Let us
hope that the future will bring no more such chattel to our
country, nor that the girl babies of China will not be
killed in the millions in the future.

Like the Jewish men thank God that they weren't born a
woman, I thank God I was not born Chinese in China.

Let the truth be known.

BTW, the fact that this book is considered suitable reading
for 9th Graders really surprises me! Some shocking
material in there! As bad as the Holocaust! Not for the
innocent!