An Amazing Memoir
Esther Yoder Stenson’s Doors Through the Great Wall is a memorable China memoir. Begin with Esther, whom Lee Snyder rightly describes as “an intrepid Amish Mennonite young woman” and place her, as Snyder writes, in a country of “cultural surprises…and a world far removed from her close Amish Mennonite community” to whose faith and practices she remains loyal.
,This author has a poet’s eye, a warm openness—if wariness at times—to all whom she meets, and a desire to risk the unknown and even dangerous in order to discover “the real China.” Also, she brought both a caring heart to her students and teaching skills from earlier experiences and her college and graduate studies.
,While Stenson organized this memoir into three chronological sections based on the cities where she lived, her chapters are not “then” and “after” lists. Instead each is its own fascinating story. A most moving chapter is “Daniel, A Door to the Past,” about the “short, slender man” in the school library who introduced himself as a Mennonite. Then there was the blue-eyed David.
,In her “Epilogue” Esther updates her readers with the “many things [that have] changed and [those that] have remained the same.”
,China is a country of many mysteries but one filled with the kinds of friendly, helpful people into whose lives Esther Yoder Stenson’s riveting memoir, Doors Through the Great Wall, truly opens many doors.,
