Chi Pang-Yuan's memoir is packed with every bit of eastern and western literature she studied, enjoyed and taught as well as all the politics and war she grew up amongst in China. Chi's family was large and spread across China during a tumultuous time, yet she manages to document the duration for everybody. Indeed, her memory is alarmingly thorough; I'm afraid I found the sheer volume of names, titles, and other minutiae overwhelming and a bit tedious to deal with. I felt like she was trying to combine memorial tributes for far too many different people with this one book (her father, her husband, various mentors, a fighter pilot, etc).
Off the main topic, but I found it interesting that the daughter of a publishing house holding family should make such offhanded comments like, "Naturally, none of us in those days had any notion of copyright." and "Most afternoons, I'd go... look at the latest pirated books, to see if anything could be used as teaching materials."
While I understand these titles don't cover the same exact historical ground, I much preferred Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Chieng, The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, and even Wild Swans by Jung Chang.