“This is the kind of story the Jade Emperor himself enjoys hearing from me, one where the focus, indeed the whole point of the tale, is the grand heroic choice, the cinematic action. He is always telling me to hurry up, to cut out the needless detail, to do some editing and present him with the stripped-down version. But life is not like that. The fight to ensure the survival of love is more likely to find its toughest battles amid small snarls about changing nappies or midnight feedings or plain old boredom; it is more likely to focus on little betrayals or hurtful slips of the tongue, to feature the day-to-day heroism of pretending not to be aware of a thousand little annoying habits. In short, love is hard work, and the fairytale ending of our story is only the beginning of the hard work of keeping love alive.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (DEC 7, 2010)

If this book doesn’t attain the high readership it deserves, there is no justice. It’s quite simply one of the most lavishly imagined, masterfully researched, exquisitely written contemporary novels I’ve read. And if that sounds as if I’m gushing…well, it’s probably because I am.

Under Fishbone Clouds is written by debut author Sam Meekings, who grew up near the south coast of England and currently resides in China. It is absolutely remarkable that the author is under 30; the book is full of gravitas and maturity that is normally the result of decades of living and writing. Interwoven seamlessly within this mesmerizing narrative is Chinese folklore and myths – absorbingly told – in addition to insights into Chinese distant and recent past history.

This novel is narrated by the Kitchen God, a common household deity who is challenged by the more powerful Jade Emperor to fathom the inner workings of the human heart. He chooses to follow a couple who, like him and his own mythical wife, were caught in the whirlwind of history: Jinyi and his wife Yuying. The tale begins in 1942 when the two fall in love, in spite of their different backgrounds and their arranged marriage, and continues to their doddering old age as the new millennium takes hold.

At the onset, Yuying follows her husband across war-torn China to her husband’s rustic and impoverished home. Bad times ensue, and when they eventually make their way back to the city, the Cultural Revolution has begun; everything now belongs to the state and all social strata are forced to undergo hard labor in the factories and the fields.

Although the Mao Cultural Revolution years have been well documented, Under Fishbone Clouds takes you up close and personal to these dehumanizing times; it is a rare reader who will not wince at the no-holds-barred look at a country whose rigid ideology trumps personal relationships and freedoms. Business owners, entrepreneurs, artists, teachers, intellectuals – all are labeled “bourgeois” and re-educated in the harshest possible ways. In a particularly harrowing scene, a man has a heart attack and is ordered to “crawl” to comfort and stop being a slacker. The depths to which Jinyi and Yuying are forced to descend to – separately, without each other’s comfort – is heartbreaking.

Yuying reflects, “Life isn’t meant for perfect things. I knew it when we were told to put making steel above common sense; I knew it when we were told to starve patriotically because the noble peasants had been huddling around homemade furnaces instead of growing food in the fields; I knew it when the whole country began to rise up to cut down the past. I felt in the pit of my stomach all the time; I just never knew what it was until now.”

Yet despite the intensity of the Cultural Revolution years, Under Fishbone Clouds is not a book about tragedy; at its heart (and a big heart it is), it’s a family saga about the universal and enduring power of love. There is sheer magic and lyricism in the love that Jinyi and Yuying share as they navigate answers that are often impenetrable.

And, Meekings suggests, by love we are transfigured. Jinyi realizes toward the end of his life: “Love also changes shape. It is no longer slim, lithe, nervous and sweaty palmed. It was no longer sleepless, heavy, a stone weighing deep within the chest. It was now warm, slow, soft, a tarry old blanket huddled under in the dark. It was the last embers of a promise made decades before, still glowing red though the flames had petered down.”

Using Jinyi as a catalyst, the Kitchen God comes to the realization that people don’t just carry on with their lives because they must; the secret of life is love, atonement, and retribution. He puzzles out the human heart as he follows this couple through all kinds of trials: deep anguish, death of children, famine and forced labor, class warfare, drastic social and culture changes, isolation and homelessness, the loss of dignity and health.

Under Fishbone Clouds is one of those rare books that I would confidently recommend to anybody: those with an interest in the history of the East, those who are enthralled with mythology and folklore, those who hold out for the best of prose, and those who are simply seeking an old-fashioned story where love prevails. I predict an amazing future for this very talented author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Thomas Dunne Books; First Edition edition (December 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Living Scotsman interview with Sam Meekings
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels based on Mao Cultural Revolution: A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong Becoming Madam Mao by Anchee Min And a current novel that it can be compared to: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Bibliography:

• Under Fishbone Clouds (2009; December 2010 in US)

“Yumi’s mother grew lazier by the day. The physical toll of childbirth had undeniably affected her vitality. But it was one thing to hand Little Eight over to Yumi, and yet another to turn the whole household over to her. What does a woman live for anyway? Isn’t it to run a household? If she shuns even the authority to do that, what besides a rotten egg with a watery yolk is she? But there were no complaints from Yumi, who was content with the way things were. When a girl learns to care for a baby and take charge of a household, she can wake up that first morning after her wedding day fully prepared to be a competent wife and a good daughter-in-law, someone who need not be in constant fear of what her mother-in-law thinks.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (AUG 9, 2010)

Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu is a tragicomic novel, a tongue-in-cheek parody, about three sisters in the Wang family living in Wang Family Village in rural China: “Many rural villages are populated mainly by families with the same surname.”   The novel opens in 1971 and ends in 1982. It is structured like three novellas though it is described by the publisher as a novel. The book’s strength, and also its weakness, is that it is primarily comprised of character studies without a lot of plot. This can make it less accessible to some readers. Throughout the novel, the author utilizes Chinese proverbs, aphorisms and adages to make points. It comes out sounding something like a Greek chorus, adding a comic element to what is often heart-rending or calamitous. It is also very culture-specific which makes it harder to access for many readers.

The background is Maoist China following the Cultural Revolution. The position of women is lowly. They have no say in their lives except through subtle avenues where they can make small choices that may have a large impact on their lives and those in their community. This is often achieved by how a salutation is given, who is addressed and who is ignored, and what gossip is spread among them.

The book opens in 1971 with the story of Yumi, the oldest sister in the Wang family. The family is comprised of seven daughters and one son. Yumi’s mother has given up the care of her son to Yumi who takes her brother around the village with pride as though she were his mother. In essence, she is the head of her family. Her father is a philanderer and a drunk who has the job of commune-secretary. He falls from grace when an affair he is having with the wife of an active duty soldier comes to light. This impacts Yumi’s marriage plans. She had been engaged to an aviator from a neighboring town but he pulls out of the engagement because of Yumi’s father’s disgrace. Yumi is a strong woman who has plans – she wants to be associated with power. She manages to become the second wife to a powerful man in another village. Though her heart is broken and she is filled with embarrassment and shame, she proceeds with her life, giving the appearance of “one of those intrepid women in propaganda posters, a woman who could charm any man and still look death in the face without flinching.”

The second part of the book is about the third daughter,Yuxio. Yuxio is a flirt and is described as cunning and two-faced, like a fox or a snake. She and Yumi have never gotten along and she has never respected Yumi’s authority. After her father’s downfall, she goes to attend a movie and during the course of the film she is abducted and raped. Yumi does her best to help her maintain face in the village but is soon gone off with her husband to a new town. On top of the shame associated with the rape, Yuxio gets into a fight with one of her younger sisters that is observed by many in the village. The outcome of this fight is that Yuxio becomes a village outcast.

Yuxio leaves her village and travels to Yumi’s home where she seductively entrenches herself into the good graces of Yumi’s stepdaughter and husband. The next thing Yumi knows, Yuxio is living with her family. There is already a wedge between Yumi and her stepdaughter and this is widened by Yuxio. Though Yuxio actually despises the girl, she fawns and acts obsequiously towards her. She is so underhandedly awful and provocative in her behaviors that she is described as “a dog that can’t stop eating shit.” She tries to install herself into the good graces of various town folk but over and over she sabotages herself by her indiscreet and false pretenses. It doesn’t take long for others to catch on to her back stabbing personality. Yumi becomes pregnant and Yuxio loses her power at home. By the end of this section Yuxio is in much worse shape than when she started. She has ended up fooling nobody, not even herself.

The third chapter in the novel is about Yuyang, seventh sister, and takes place in 1982. Yuyang has won a scholarship to a teaching college and gets involved in the intrigue of the school, working on underground intelligence. This consists primarily of keeping an eye on her fellow students and teachers to see who is fraternizing with whom and reporting these events to her superior. She has read a lot of Agatha Christie and feels up to the job.

The novel ends without pulling together the lives of the three sisters. There is no follow-up to the other two stories and no real connecting of them. That is why I consider this book to be comprised of novellas rather than considering it a novel. I think this book might appeal to readers who are familiar with Chinese literature and culture. It is not likely to have widespread appeal because of stylistic issues. I found it informative and interesting, at times laugh-out-loud funny but I am sure that there is a lot here that went past me. (Translated by Howard Goldbatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (August 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bi Feiyu
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More from Chinese writers: The Dictionary of Maqiao Han Shaogong

Bibliography:

• The Moon Opera (2007; 2009 in US)
• Three Sisters (2008; August 2010 in US)

“The family’s changes seemed especially hard on Cao Chunmei. In the beginning, the pressure of loans and investment weighed heavily on Wei Ziqi, but now business had been stable for two years. He took pride in his rising status – there was a new confidence to the way he moved around the village. But in Sancha a woman rarely occupies that role, and for Cao Chunmei, more customers only meant more work. On busy weekends she rarely left the kitchen; most mornings she woke up to a stack of dirty dishes from the previous night’s guests. She gained little pleasure from the new income, and her contact with outsiders was fleeting.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (MAR 4, 2010)

The first section of New Yorker writer Hessler’s engrossing three-part portrait of China’s headlong rush to the future is peppered with questions from the Chinese driving test:

“223. If you come to a road that has been flooded, you should:
Accelerate so the motor doesn’t flood.
Stop, examine the water to make sure it’s shallow, and drive across slowly.
Find a pedestrian and make him cross ahead of you.”

Hessler came to China in 1996 with the Peace Corp and stayed for 10 years. He got his license in 2001, as roads and drivers were proliferating, and planned a cross-country trip. Development was intense in coastal regions but the north and west were still remote, many roads unlabeled.

“352. If another motorist stops you to ask directions, you should:
Not tell him.
Reply patiently and accurately.

tell him the wrong way.”

He decided to follow the Great Wall, which is actually a series of fortifications built of various materials in various states of ruin. It was harvest time and the farmers laid their produce on the edges of the road for sorting and drying and threw grain into the middle for threshing.

“Initially I found it hard to drive over food. On the first day of my journey, I screeched to a halt before every pile, rolling down the window. ‘Is it OK for me to go through?’ The farmers shouted back impatiently ‘Go, go, go!’ And so I went – millet, sorghum, and wheat cracking beneath me. By the second day I no longer asked; by the third day I learned to accelerate at the sight of grain.”

He meets amateur historians and government tree planters, picks up hitchhiking young people coming from factory towns to visit family, and camps in the desert to avoid officialdom (Hessler’s favorite Chinese motto is “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”)

His prose meanders organically, exploring the China of the past and the present, from the Ming dynasty and the route of Genghis Khan to the roller-coaster excitement of road-testing the newest Chinese car.

He also proves his credentials here as a fearless adventurer. Few things can be more dangerous than driving in China, where driving lessons are laugh-out-loud bizarre, seat belts and turn signals are considered superfluous and traffic fatalities are twice as high as in the US, with one fifth the number of vehicles.

In Book II Hessler homes in on the traditional village, renting a house in mountainous, rural Sancha about two hours drive from Beijing (maps orient the reader at the start of each section – would there were pictures too!) as a writing retreat. There is only one child in the village (the young have migrated to the cities) and Hessler becomes friendly with Wei Jia’s parents, Wei Ziqi and Cao Chunmei.

Handicapped by his lack of education (typical in the country) and his peasant looks, Wei Ziqi tried factory work, but returned to his village to farm. Smart and ambitious, he had tried and failed at leech farming and was now turning to tourism, which was following the better roads and increased prosperity.

Hessler limns the family’s fortunes as Wei Ziqi builds a restaurant, and takes up the two essentials for doing business – smoking and drinking. As the friendship grows, Hessler drives Wei Jia to boarding school kindergarten and witnesses Cao Chunmei’s growing unhappiness and isolation. China remains a man’s world and there’s no place where that’s more evident than the countryside.

For Wei Ziqi, ambition and increased prosperity opens new doors. He’s invited to join the Communist Party and run for office. He owns wardrobes for both city and country. For Cao Chunmei increased prosperity means more work. For both it means more anxiety. Wei Ziqi gets angry and drinks too much, his wife grows more fatalistic.

Through his connection to the Weis, Hessler explores village gossip and politics, and takes part in the walnut harvest. In a harrowing section (which was a New Yorker article) Hessler encounters the Chinese medical system first-hand when Wei Jia becomes suddenly ill and it’s Hessler, with his car and U.S. connections, who tracks down treatment.

Hessler’s American sensibilities often illuminate the cultural contrasts. When the Weis grow rich enough to have a TV and Wei Jia comes home from school, the formerly tough and wiry boy grows soft in front of the TV eating junk food all day. Hessler frets about this, but to Cao Chunmei there’s no point in having a TV if you don’t watch it and few pleasures greater than watching a child eat.

The final section explores the burgeoning factory towns popping up along new expressways, each with a specialization – buttons, playing cards, umbrellas. “Datang produces one-third of the socks on earth.”

Hessler chooses Lishui for his focus: a town that is about to have an expressway exit, and already has an Economic Development Zone. He gets in on the ground floor, approaching a city-dressed man outside a half-built factory and follows the fortunes of the place from factory design, which takes an hour and a half, to production (bra-strap loops), rocky times, success and reorganization.

Again, individuals provide the narrative impetus. The owners let Hessler hang around for good times and bad. Job interviews are a rough and tumble affair. The best incentives are lots of overtime and no vacations, since there’s really nothing else to do.

Hessler finds another fascinating group to follow when, on the basis of outsize personality and persistence, a teenager gets jobs for her whole resourceful family, who also run a side business providing goods to workers.

There’s tension in the beginning when the expensive machinery doesn’t work, tension when the orders don’t come in like they should, tension when their most crucial worker wants to visit his pregnant wife (code, maybe, for abandoning the sinking factory).

Contrasts and contradictions abound. The group dynamic is so strong one complaint can spark a sea of grumbling, but self-help books urge workers to lie and think solely of themselves. A precious baby’s 50th-day celebration takes place in a cigarette-smoke filled restaurant amid spatters of hot oil.

Upheavals in the countryside – particularly dam-building projects – create a lot of grumbling, but to little effect. “It was particularly depressing because in a way the system worked well. It didn’t necessarily make people happy, and it certainly wasn’t fair, but it was extremely functional.” The government scattered people, resettling villagers in a lot of different towns. “And they created lots of little rules that distracted people from the larger issues.”

Armed with the informed outsider’s ability to see the larger picture, Hessler engages the reader with his own affection and fascination for an ancient culture in overdrive. Endlessly curious, fluent in the language, willing to go anywhere, and talk to anyone, his graceful prose carries us along, into the mountains, the dusty deserts, the mud-walled village huts and concrete factories, but most of all into the lives of the people he meets.

Humorous, affecting and intelligent, Hessler’s latest  should captivate anyone with an inkling of interest in China.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper; 1 edition (February 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE:	“Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Factory to Factory
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Peter Hessler
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Harper’s interview with Peter Hessler
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of book by his wife: Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang

Bibliography:

• River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001)
• Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China (2006)
• “Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Factory to Factory (February 2010)

“The [gender] divide implied certain things. Young women enjoyed a more fluid job situation; they could join a factory assembly line and move up to be clerks or salespeople. Young men had a harder time entering a factory, and once in they were often stuck. Women, in the factory or out, came into contact with a wider range of people and quickly adopted the clothes, hairstyles, and accents of the city; men tended to stay locked in their outsider worlds. Women integrated more easily into urban life, and they had more incentive to stay.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (MAR 4, 2010)

American journalist Chang, who kept her Chinese heritage at arm’s length for many years, explores her family’s past and the country’s history as she follows the lives of migrant workers in the industrial city of Dongguan, where 70 percent of the population is female.

Most of the factory girls are uneducated, age 18 to 25, flocking in from rural villages. “Most migrants associated the place they came from with poverty and backwardness, and some were even reluctant to say the name of their village.”

Chang, former Wall Street Journal Beijing Bureau chief, surveys the scene, interviewing many and getting a sense of their naiveté, hopes and ambitions, before homing in on several stories and following two in particular, Chunming and Min. An engaging storyteller, Chang pulls readers into the girls’ dreams, failures and desires, turning this in-depth social study into a riveting page-turner.

“To me every town looked the same. Construction sites and cheap restaurants. Factories, factories, factories, the metal lattices of their gates drawn shut like nets. Min saw the city through different eyes: Every town was the possibility of a more desirable job than the one she had. Her mental map of Dongguan traced all the bus journeys she had made in search of a better life.”

Chang visits The Talent Market, where young people jockey for jobs, seldom staying put for long, though bosses hold back two months of pay and may try to prevent them from leaving. Mobile phones are lifelines. To lose one is to lose all contact with friends, who have no fixed abode, no relatives to anchor them.

“Women worked as clerks and in human resources and sales, and they held most of the jobs on the assembly line; the bosses felt that young women were more diligent and easy to manage.”

Want ads were often very specific:

“SALESPERSON: FEMALE ONLY, GRADE FOUR ENGLISH
RECEPTIONIST: FEMALE ONLY, CAN SPEAK CANTONESE
SECURITY GUARDS: MALE, UNDER 30, 1.7 METERS OR ABOVE, EX-MILITARY, KNOWS FIREFIGHTING, CAN PLAY BASKETBALL A PLUS

As Chang moves from the general to the personal she calls on diaries, e-mails and visits with Chunming and Min, who are more ambitious and single-minded than most, learning first to use their youth and naivety to land a job, and then to scheme and lie and study hard to jump to better jobs, out of the factory and into the office.

Chunming is lured into a brothel and escapes, losing everything but her life, then claws her way back with a stolen ID card, eventually reaching heady heights in sales, only to have the company collapse and land her back on the assembly line. Not that she stays there for long.

Most girls return home to marry after age 25. Min and Chunming, still ambitious, hope to marry, but their attempts at meeting men mostly fizzle. The man is too short, or not ambitious enough, or maybe too violent and dissolute.

Chang visits Min’s family with her and charts the contrasts between village closeness (and lack of privacy), customs and family hierarchy, to the free-for-all life of the factory town. And, too, the family balance of power is changing. Min, sending back money, making home improvements, has more say and more attitude.

Exploring the lives of these girls, Chang makes side trips into her own family history – her landowner grandfather, village life, the family flight to Taiwan, migration to America. The contrast is as sobering as the pace of life in modern China, where nothing stays the same for long and history is to be honored and then smashed up for re-development.

Chang’s well-organized book is an illuminating portrait of a culture in economic and social upheaval and her empathetic portrayal of individuals is moving and engrossing.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; Reprint edition (August 4, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE:	Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Leslie T. Chang
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read review of her husband’s book: Country Driving by Peter Hessler

Bibliography:

• Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (October 2008)

“I understand that this letter will wreak havoc with your investigation. But what we are all searching for, of course, is clarity. I hope that what I have written can contribute to that…. The day we stop searching for the truth, which is never objective but under the best circumstances built on facts, is the day on which our system of justice collapses completely.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (FEB 16, 2010)

Henning Mankell’s The Man from Beijing, ably translated by Laurie Thompson, opens in January 2006. It is eerily quiet in the northern Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen. No smoke rises from the chimneys and not a soul stirs. A photographer studying deserted villages in Sweden arrives and knocks on doors, but no one answers. Fearing that something is wrong, he breaks into one of the houses and to his horror, “there was an old woman lying on the kitchen floor. Her head was almost totally severed from her neck. Beside her lay the carcass of a dog, cut in two.” This isolated place will soon make headlines as the scene of a massacre “unprecedented in the annals of Swedish crime.” An unknown assailant used an extremely sharp weapon to torture and cut up his victims.

After Detective Vivian Sundberg and her team survey the carnage, they call for reinforcements, but even experienced law enforcement officials are stymied by the slaughter of nineteen people, most of them elderly. Equally puzzling is the fact that three individuals living in Hesjövallen were left alive. A district judge, fifty-seven year old Birgitta Roslin, has a personal interest in the matter (her mother grew up in Hesjövallen), and we get to know Roslin intimately. She takes her job seriously, suffers from recurrent panic attacks and high-blood pressure, has four grown children whom she sees infrequently, and worries about the future of her passionless marriage. Her fate will be inextricably tied up with the mass murder, which grew out of terrible events whose roots lie in the distant past.

The beginning of the book has an epic sweep and is absolutely mesmerizing. Mankell takes us to China in 1863, where the peasants live in squalor and are oppressed by wealthy and avaricious landowners. The author poignantly recounts the odyssey of three orphaned brothers who travel to Canton to find work. Eventually, they cross the path of predators who transport them in chains to the United States, where they spend many backbreaking hours cleaving mountains and laying rail lines for the transcontinental railroad. Because one of the brothers manages to survive long enough to leave a detailed diary, the tale of his family’s suffering will have grave consequences more than a century later.
Birgitta, whose mother grew up with foster parents in Hesjövallen, uses her sharp judicial mind to form a theory about the killings, based on the fact that a Chinese man was seen in the vicinity of Hesjövallen around the time of the murders. Since the police do not take her ideas seriously, she takes advantage of an opportunity to visit China with an old friend, Karin. There, Birgitta visits the Forbidden City, sees the Great Wall, and reminisces about her younger years as a radical who supported Mao’s ideals of solidarity and liberation. She also tries to learn the identity of the man behind the mass execution in Sweden. Unfortunately, her inquiries place her in danger, since she is being watched by a powerful and psychotic villain who will dispose of her if she gets too close to the truth.

Here, the novel starts to lose steam, as Mankell not only reveals the identity of the killer (a one-dimensional monster), but also introduces too many extraneous characters and subplots. Also irritating is the incredible ineptitude of the Swedish police, who are so clueless that Birgitta has to do their job for them. In addition, the pace of the narrative is slowed by tedious and heavy-handed passages in which various individuals lecture about China’s path to the future. Should this emerging superpower make more of an effort to stay true to its communist roots instead of succumbing to the lures of capitalism? Mankell has combined a crime story with a depiction of a female jurist’s midlife crisis and a polemic about China’s efforts to become a worldwide economic and political force. This is far too much baggage for one work of fiction.

The Man from Beijing might have been more satisfying had the author focused throughout on the massacre and on Birgitta’s efforts to solve the mystery and put her troubled life back together. As it stands, Mankell has written half of a good novel. The second half is a bit dreary and diffuse, and it will take some persistence to stay the course for the entire 366 pages.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 186 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 16, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Henning Mankell Wikipedia page on Henning Mankell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Daniel Italian Shoes The Troubled Man The Fifth Women Other Swedish crime writers: Stieg Larsson Johan Theorin

Bibliography:

Kurt Wallander Series:

• Faceless Killers (1991;1997 in US)
• The Dogs of Riga (1992; 2001in US)
• The White Lioness (1993; 1998 in US)
• The Man Who Smiled (1994; 2005 in US)
• Sidetracked (1995; 1999 in US)
• The Fifth Woman (1996; 2000 in US)
• One Step Behind (1997; 2002 in US)
• Firewall (1998; 2002 in US)
• The Pyramid: The First Wallander Cases (1999; 2008 in US)
• The Troubled Man (2009; 2011 in US)

Stand alone novels:

• Chronicler of the Winds (1985; June 2012 in US)
• The Return of the Dancing Master (2000; 2004 in US)
• Before the Frost (2002; 2005 in US)
• Depths (2004; 2009 in US)
• Italian Shoes (2006; October2010 in US)
• Kennedy’s Brain (2007; 2008 in US)
• The Eye of Leopard (2008; 2009 in US)
• The Man from Beijing (2007; 2010 in US)
• Daniel (2010 in US)

Teen Read:

• Shadows in the Twilight (2008;  2010 in US)

Movies from books:

• Wallander: Sidetracked / Firewall / One Step Behind (2009)
• Wallander (Faceless Killers / The Man Who Smiled / The Fifth Woman) (2010)

“She looked down at the blood that had already turned dark, then looked around, and finally looked at the two boys, her gaze blurring as her eyes filled with tears. She knelt down, opened her bag, and took out a piece of clothing to spread on the ground. Then she carefully brushed off the flies and scooped up the dark crimson dirt into a shirt, kneeling there until she had gathered every last speck of dirt that had been stained by the blood. Even then she continued to kneel, sifting the dirt through her fingers as if she were searching for gold, still looking for the last traces of Song Fanping’s blood.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (JAN 16, 2010)

If one is asked to summarize Brothers, most likely the answer would be something like this: Two brothers lose each other as each tries in his own way to cope with massive change, first cultural and then economic. One gains immense wealth, the other loses hope…and his life. Yet, despite it all, their bond remains.

Brothers‘ more than six hundred pages mixes sections of pathos – such as the nineteenth chapter from which the introductory quotation above was excerpted – with a more characteristic Rabelaisian feel. Almost contrarily, this Chinese novel often feels cartoonish or Three Stooges-esque and is chock full of bodily functions and fluids, prurient interests and profane exclamations. The first paragraph leads the way into this black comedy with this Twilight Zone situation:

“Baldy Li, our Liu Town’s premier tycoon, had a fantastic plan for spending twenty million U.S. dollars to purchase a ride on a Russian Federation space shuttle for a tour of outer space. Perched atop his famously gold-plated toilet seat, he would close his eyes and imagine himself already floating in orbit….”

The text continues,

“Baldy Li used to have a brother named Song Gang, who was a year older and a whole head taller and with whom he shared everything. Loyal, stubborn, Song Gang had died three years earlier, reduced to a pile of ashes….The ashes from even a sapling, he thought, would outweigh those from Song Gang’s bones.”

Immediately then, Brothers reveals two end-point conditions: one brother wealthy, one brother dead. The question though is what life trajectory brought Baldy Li (Baldy was his nickname because he shaved his head, not his family name) and Song Gang to their respective fates, and the novel proceeds to backtrack to their childhoods in order to fill in their stories. But first a sojourn to Baldy Li as a fourteen-year-old whose curiosity about female bottoms takes him to the local public toilet where he peeps at five different bare rear ends on the ladies’ side before being collared. For an ordinary boy and a different kind of book, this would only have been a passing example of adolescent folly, but Baldy Li, foreshadowing his later entrepreneurial (and sexual) prowess turns his escapade into opportunity for profit. In the process, the reader is treated to pages and pages of butts and other cesspool topics. We learn that Baldy Li unknowingly repeated his birth father’s stinky feat, but while Baldy Li lived long to tell about it, his old man actually perished in the act, leaving Baldy Li’s mother, Li Lan, a widow who had lost face in their town.

Song Fanping, Song Gang’s natural father, is kind and considerate to Li Lan during the first years of Baldy Li’s life (he was born just after his father drowned), and when he himself is widowed, he and she marry. So, the two brothers are actually stepbrothers, with no blood ties. They are seven and six when when their families blend, and soon the two are inseparable.

However, within a year or so, the Cultural Revolution is initiated by Chairman Mao, and here Brothers depicts horrifying acts against those labeled “landlords” or other fingered enemies of the revolution. Song Fanping, a teacher who hailed from the landlord class, is subjected to indignities and far worse by the young cadres that have been let loose by Mao. His harrowing death, like much in the novel, seems over-the-top, but also believable given the chaos and violence that did actually sweep China during those years.

When this book stirred controversy upon publication in China, Brothers‘ author, Yu Hua, gave an interview in Beijing in 2006, stating, ” ‘My stories may be extreme, but you can find all of this in China.’ ” He himself was about Baldy Li’s age when the Cultural Revolution hit and although he doesn’t explicitly say so in the interview, he almost certainly witnessed adults who had to wear peaked dunce caps and day after day allow themselves to be “struggled against.” For Westerners (well, at least for me), the exaggerated, satirical aspects of Brothers distract from its potential as a serious novel. It is confusing to read such a broad, bawdy, often dumbed-down portrait of a Chinese village. And indeed, the fact that Yu Hua chose to write this way also caused some Chinese critics to lash out at him when the book was published there. One derided it as a “trashy, Hollywood-style portrait of the country.” That seems a not unreasonable attitude for them to take. However, as the article notes, the novel (divided into two parts in China) sold over a million copies which was considered “a remarkable achievement.” Upon reflection, it seems to me that Yu Hua’s deliberate style isn’t only an imitation and reflection of the “the crude, accusatory posters” that were used to denounce people during the Cultural Revolution but also a crafty way to inject criticism of China’s past revolutionary excesses without having the book suppressed by government officials in his country. In using overblown plots for smaller things (such as the public toilet scandals), he can then fit in the horrors that cost lives without drawing special approbation; these horrors might be overblown too…but probably are not.

Interestingly, despite numerous events in the novel where citizens pummel each other, sometimes to bloody pulps, the constabulary is nowhere to be seen during these brawls. They are only involved once — when Baldly Li checks out women’s bottoms, and then only because residents haul Baldy Li to the police station. They aren’t concerned about Baldy Li’s bloody face after being beaten by the angry fathers and husbands of the women whose butts he glimpsed. As the original perpetrator, presumably he deserved his retribution in the eyes of the law. But they do deal with his bathroom spying. Other representatives of China’s Communist hierarchy seldom make an appearance, and when they do, it is mainly to dispense bureaucratic guidelines and rather mild prohibitions. Yu Hua heaps the responsibility for the violent zeal of the Cultural Revolution and other, less organized violent village squabbles on the citizens, not the government, which is probably quite prudent immunization against being censured even during this relatively tolerant era of rule in China.

Back to the plot. Once Baldy Li’s mother passes away (when he is still a teen), he and his brother live together and vie for the same young woman. Then when she makes her choice, Baldy Li and Song Gang trek along very different roads, rarely seeing one another again. They become, in effect, symbols as well as characters as they personify the economic fast track (after a few setbacks) versus the hand-to-mouth existence of a steady but unimaginative labor force. Then they respectively represent out-of-this-world success versus defeat of body and determination. How Baldy Li makes his millions is amusing and yet serves as a parable of the Chinese economic boom, while the desperate, supererogatory measures that Song Gang takes to earn money in the marketplace invoke an incredulous revulsion but also deep sympathy for him. Everywhere in Liu Town and elsewhere, money is being shaken almost from the trees by hook and crook, by crazy stunts, by sweet talk, and by luck played out with a knack for making a deal.

In tandem with the economic explosion of the 1990’s, the novel’s fixation on sex also inflates. Another case in point after the infamous bathroom peeping takes place much later in the book: a virgin beauty contest. This is another Baldy Li brainchild in which verification of virginity is done by physically checking whether hymens are intact (and this was the portion of the novel I least liked). During his lean times — and he has them, just as Song Gang does — Baldy Li pretty much swears off women, but as his pocketbook swells so does his appetite for the opposite sex. This obsession ultimately leads the very randy Baldy Li to commit a sexual transgression that irrevocably affects him, Song Gang, and the woman they had both pursued in their youth.

As Brothers follows Baldy Li and Song Gang through decades, it simultaneously paints a heavily sardonic background of Chinese village life. Much of the narrative follows supporting characters. The blacksmith, a woman shopkeeper, two pretentious would-be literati, and a slowly rising bureaucrat are among these, as is, in the earlier parts of the book, a long-haired, strutting teenager whom still-kid Baldy Li gloms onto during a period when he would otherwise be left to his own devices in the streets. The older boy was once Baldy Li’s tormenter. But now the teen’s father also has to wear the dunce cap of an enemy of the people, and shunned and lonely the teen allows the child nearly half his age to tag along. However, sticking to the older boy like glue causes Baldy Li to witness and nearly become the victim of a bloody atrocity in the street, an atrocity again carried out by the people, not authorities. Mainly though, the villagers are busybodies and sometimes simple-minded. When offered opportunities to invest in various Baldy Li enterprises, they don’t fully understand what it means to be shareholders and this leads to misunderstandings, bitterness and more beatings.

How then, to assess this novel?

As mentioned, this is a mixture of tall-tale storytelling and kernels (gems) of insight. It is entertaining in its absurdity, but also disappointing to a degree for the same reason. For many readers, the serious themes and the touching relationships may shed some of their gravitas and meaning because of the novel’s overarching farcical antics and facetious tone. Still, the several deaths it grimly details arguably give the novel its existential backbone and its true claim to being a solid work of literature because the deaths and their aftermaths embody human suffering, devotion, courage, and love. Song Fanping’s death especially remains in the mind as a brutal stilling of a man possessed of nearly indomitable, generous spirit.

Brothers is certainly a remarkably imaginative novel. It doesn’t present the reader with any dull moments. Something weird or shocking is always afoot. Someone is always burping, pissing, crying, sweating, cussing, humping, eating, dying, beating someone, chasing a girl, or trying to make money. And it works — in its own way, as its own inimitable literary “artwork.” It isn’t a realist “painting” or, on the other extreme, an abstract one. Instead, It’s more of an impressionist piece that exaggerates and caricatures, yet succeeds in shining light on things and history that otherwise might receive none. The human tragedies that really mark the epochs of so-called progress may not all get their due, but, in a sense, fiction memorializes them anyway. (Translated by Carlos Rojas)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor (January 12, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AMAZON PAGE:	Brothers
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Yu Hua
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More by Chinese authors: Beijing Coma by Ma Jian Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong

Bibliography:

• The Past and the Punishments: Eight Stories (1996 in US)
• To Live (1992)
• Chronicles of a Blood Merchant (1995; 2003 in US)
• Cries in the Drizzle (2003; 2007 in US)
• Brothers (2005; January 2009 in US)

“When I walked inside the broadcast tent, a long-haired student from the Central Academy of Art was waving his hands animatedly. ‘…We’re going to build a huge statue called the Goddess of Democracy,’ he said. ‘It’ll be amazing.’ “

Book Review:

Reviewed by Kirstin Merrihew (JUN 13, 2009)

The novel Beijing Coma follows the fictional Dai Wei, a PhD candidate at Beijing University who became a student leader of the protesters in Tiananmen Square during the momentous and tragic month of June, 1989. As the Chinese army was ordered to storm the Square to take back control and subdue the ring leaders by any means necessary, many of Wei’s friends and associates were gunned down or simply run over. That famous actual video of the tank column stopped dead before a single brave man was an aberration. As Wei saw: “As the smoke cleared, a scene appeared before me that singed the retinas of my eyes. On the strip of road which the tank had just rolled over, between a few crushed bicycles, lay a mass of silent, flattened bodies. I could see Bai Ling’s yellow and white striped T-shirt and red banner drenched in blood. Her face was completely flat.”  

In the chaos and slaughter, he searched for his former girlfriend. “Then I saw her: it was A-Mei, in a long white dress, her freshly washed hair floating softly around her shoulders. Why was she standing in the line of fire like that? I pulled the blood-stained letter from my pocket, waved it in the air and ran towards her….There was a loud gunshot, flecks of black light, then I saw her fall to her knees.”

Beijing Coma does not censor itself when luridly describing the visceral details of the dead and dying in the Square, but in this review, I will refrain from quoting the most hellish bits. However, such editing isn’t a repudiation of the author’s decision to depict the massacre (or other situations) with bloody, gory precision. It’s just a personal belief that these mental pictures belong in the novel, not here on this review website. Ma Jian had every reason to write as graphically as he did. He was born in Qingdao, China, in 1953 and lived and worked on the Communist mainland until 1987 when he, as a dissident, moved to Hong Kong. He returned to Communist China a number of times, and “supported the pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square.” After Hong Kong reverted to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 (under a “one country, two systems” plan), he moved to Germany and then London and continued to write about his distant homeland. Ma Jian unflinchingly, glaringly uses his fiction to reveal the monstrous cruelties that could and did actually take place in totalitarian China. He doesn’t shy away one iota from the barbarity of the suppression in the Square — the whole truth of which the Chinese authorities have tried to keep under wraps. Many Westerners haven’t yet realized what the full, immediate brunt and the long-term consequences were, especially to those (and their families) who directly took part in the Tiananmen uprising.

Ma Jian did not witness first-hand the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre (so he relied on others for accounts) because, as he relates in this interview (http://www.pwf.cz/en/authors-archive/ma-jian/2445.html), his brother fell into a coma (from which he never really recovered) after an accident in their hometown in late May. Ma Jian, of course, went to him. This family sorrow led the author to also place his main protagonist and narrator, Wei, in a coma precipitated by a bullet wound in Tiananmen. After witnessing A-Mei fall, Wei remembered “…my head exploded. My skeleton was shaken by a bolt of pain. I’d been struck too….My hand reached out to my head but couldn’t find it.”

We readers aren’t technically in Tiananmen Square with Wei either. We are in Wei’s head, intimately sharing his vivid recollections. We actually “meet” Wei well after the brutal suppression in the Square, well after he’d been shot. By the time we enter his thoughts, he had been in a coma for some time. Inside himself, Wei regained gradual awareness of his surroundings, and was able to access memories, although these abilities waxed and waned to a degree and weren’t apparent to most people on the outside. Beijing Coma follows Wei’s inner recollections of the days that led up to June 4, 1989. He, having had nothing to do but think and feel, reconsidered every scrap of memory he could piece together, leaving the reader with an in-depth chronology of the weeks, days, and hours leading to the confrontation on the Square. He also painstakingly traced his existence as a “vegetable” over nearly two decades. Wei lay in various locations including a hospital, a suspect clinic, and several cold and dingy apartments. As an enemy of the State, the government was not particularly concerned with his welfare or that of anyone taking care of him, including his mother. As he lay alone, sometimes abandoned for several days (and susceptible to abuse by strangers and supposed friends alike), he catalogued the slightest physical changes that could herald a chance to break out of his bodily prison. He also flashed back to his childhood and pre-Tiananmen school days.

The son of a a violinist who spent twenty years in a labor camp being “corrected” for being a “rightist” and a woman who craved normality and acceptance for herself and her children, Wei seemed to be on the track to a non-political adult life in the biological sciences. But at the university, he and the rest of the student body ravenously scrounged knowledge of all kinds. They had weathered the Cultural Revolution and its contractively punitive aftermath, and, as Wei explained, “Now that China had opened its doors to the West, we devoured every scrap of information that blew in.”

They also hotly debated every topic under the sun (as most college students tend to), including political ones. Early in the novel, some of the students disagreed about whether economic development (as in the experimental Shenzhen Economic Zone) was dependent on political reform. Bai Ling didn’t think so. A young man named Fang Li countered, “Without a democratic political system in place, our economy will eventually founder. The people’s wealth will be eaten up by the corrupt institutions of this one-party state.” Fang Li’s prediction could still come true for China, but as we have observed in the years since Tiananmen Square, so far the Communist system has been able to continue to restrict freedoms while dramatically expanding economically. Ultimately, the students were not content merely to jaw about reforming government. Their unbridled enthusiasms for applying Western democratic principles outstripped the ability of the Chinese rulers to adjust, and Wei and the others paid the price for young idealism. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese youth turned more “revolutionary” than their elders; in 1989, the Tiananmen student leaders again went to “extremes,” this time for democracy. Often, the young want to act unreservedly for change; those in power typically prefer more “moderate” steps and fear the unleashing of such “radical” actions.

Having studied biochemistry and anatomy (sometimes, in his classes, dissecting the corpses of executed prisoners), comatose Wei could minutely track his own moribund body’s setbacks and breakthroughs as he lay paralyzed on iron-framed beds. He thought, in the second person: “Your body is a trap, a square with no escape routes.”Wei’s personal state also broadly symbolizes the helplessness of the freedom movement in China. For dissidents such as Ma Jian, or for his novel’s characters, this extended period of one-party rule has kept China from awakening to its true potential: the country is not “conscious” in all the ways it could and “should” be. It “survives” but isn’t fully alive.
I actually read Beijing Coma about a year ago. But for the longest time, I felt a need to digest it and also put some distance between myself and it. I couldn’t bring myself to write a review in a timely fashion when the hardcover was published. I let it sit. The book both awes and horrifies me. Ma Jian chillingly peers into so many de-humanizing Chinese windows, and the tortures and terrors revealed almost paralyze the reader’s mind too. The trampling of dignity, the pressure chamber of compliance, the relentlessness of violence all invade the mind reading the thoughts of prone Dai Wei. Yet, this novel of nearly six hundred pages also shines resplendently with the resilience, the determination, the courage, and the undaunted spirit of humanity. Consider this passage from pages one and two:

“Before the sparrow arrived, you had almost stopped thinking about flight. Then, last winter, it soared through the sky and landed in front of you, or more precisely on the windowsill of the covered balcony adjoining your bedroom. You know the grimy windowpanes were caked with dead ants and dust, and smelt as sour as the curtain. but the sparrow wasn’t put off. It jumped inside the covered balcony and ruffled its feathers, releasing a sweet smell of tree bark into the air. Then it flew into your bedroom, landed on your chest and stayed there like a warm egg.

“Your blood is getting warmer. The muscles in your eye sockets quiver. Your eyes will soon fill with tears….A bioelectrical signal darts like a spark of light from the neurons in your motor cortex, down the spinal cord to a muscle fibre at the tip of your finger.

“You will no longer have to rely on your memories to get through the day. This is not a momentary flash of life before death. This is a new beginning.”

Beijing Coma took Ma Jian ten years to complete. It is a work of austere frankness, and poetic beauty. It is one story of youthful vigor, love, and discovery all attempting to stay “healthy” in an ultimately poisonous environment. It portrays the hopefulness of individuals and movements, but also reproves it in the face of political reality. It fervently yearns for the best in human beings but faces the worst. Ma Jian, through his Dai Wei, feels compelled to ask the question, “But once you’ve climbed out of this fleshy tomb, where is there left for you to go?”  Oddly, the “freedom” of Wei’s mind is greater in his frozen body than it would be if he got up and walked. Ma Jian’s tome leaves no doubt about why this has been, and continues to be, so.

This novel is a challenge to reader stamina and sensibilities, but it is worth every effort. It is a masterpiece commemorating the sacrifices of the Tiananmen movement and, more widely, China’s ongoing struggles to establish a State worthy of every citizen’s respect and voluntary participation. The ephemeral erection of the Goddess of Democracy constituted a glittering moment — an amazing moment — that galvanized the world, but didn’t shake Communist China’s hierarchy’s hold on power. It remains to be seen how history will use the Tiananmen Square legacy and whether the dream of a non-totalitarian country can be realized.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador; Reprint edition (June 9, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Ma Jian
EXTRAS:	Excerpt The New York Times review of Beijing Coma
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books on China: Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong Out of Mao’s Shadow by Philip P. Pan

Bibliography:

• The Noodle Maker (2005)
• Stick Out Your Tongue(2006)
• Beijing Coma (May 2008)

Nonfiction:

• Red Dust: A Path Through China (2001)

“What’s the first impression you have of a new place? Is it the first meal you eat? The first time you have an ice cream cone? The first person you meet? The first night you spend in your new bed in your new home? The first broken promise? The first time you realize that no one cares about you as anything other than the potential bearer of sons? The knowledge that your neighbors are so poor that they put only a dollar in your “lai see,” as if that were enough to give a woman a secret treasure to last a lifetime? The recognition that your father-in-law, a man born in this country, has been so isolated in Chinatowns throughout his life that he speaks the most pathetic English ever? The moment that you understand that everything you’d come to believe about your in-laws’ class standing, prosperity, and fortune is as wrong as everything you thought about your natal family’s status and wealth?”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Jana L. Perskie (MAY 26, 2009)

Shanghai China in 1937 is known as the “Paris of the East.” It is a thoroughly modern, international city, with a large foreign community. There is also a heavily populated Little Tokyo section, where Japanese residents promote “Friendship, Cooperation and Co-prosperity between China and Japan.”

Pearl and May, (generational name Long – which means Dragon), are the novel’s protagonists. Pearl, the older sister is the narrator. She is quite lovely, very tall and willowy with rosy cheeks. These attributes, however, prevent her from being considered a classic Chinese beauty. Petite May, with her porcelain complexion and fine features, is thought to be perfection itself. Pearl is not jealous of her sister at all. She says, “How can I be jealous of my sister when I adore her.” And the two are truly best friends who go everywhere together.

Both young women are very sophisticated and model for “beautiful-girl artists.” Their pictures usually grace calendars, but they are also used to advertise a series of products from cigarettes to pills for improving the complexion. The two consider themselves to be “‘kaoteng Huajen,” superior Chinese, who follow the religion of “ch’ung yang,” the worship of all things foreign.  Both sisters have been educated by American and British teachers, and Pearl, who is an excellent student, is fluent in four languages. May is more flighty, charmingly spoiled, and has little interest in studies. They have defied their father, “Baba,” who believes in the Confucian religion which says, “An educated woman is a worthless woman.” And they both plan to marry for love.

Unfortunately, “Baba” Long, who is an affluent businessman, has a gambling habit and owes a fortune to the criminal Green Gang headed by Pockmarked Huang. The crime boss is so powerful that his reach extends throughout China and beyond. So Baba makes an arrangement with Huang to remunerate him. His daughters are to be sold into an arranged marriage and the money used to pay off the gambling debt. The Long family has lost everything and is threatened with death if the agreement is not honored.

The grooms are “Golden Mountain men,” who have traveled with their father, Old Man Louie, to find brides in China. Pearl and May are married within twenty-four hours after learning of their father’s “troubles.” Old Man Louie lives in Los Angeles, where he owns various factories. His older son, Sam Louie, is about Pearl’s age and although not educated, he has a pleasant demeanor. However, Vern is only fourteen and May is horrified to be forced into a relationship with a boy. Non-quota immigration visas are obtained for the sisters at the American Consulate. Pearl and May are to take a boat to Hong Kong to meet their new husbands and father-in-law, who have traveled ahead of them. From there they will all take a ship to Los Angeles.

A few weeks later, in July 1937, the Sino-Japanese War breaks out. During the first months of the war, the city of Shanghai is brought under the control of the Japanese army. The Japanese wage a fierce three-month battle and Chinese and Japanese troops fight in downtown Shanghai and in the outlying towns. The sisters, caught up in the horrific bombings, flee the city with their mother, looking for a way to Hong Kong. Along the way, Japanese soldiers repeatedly rape both Pearl and her mother, while May remains in hiding. The mother dies and the sisters barely escape with their lives.

They manage, after much hardship, to obtain steerage passage to Los Angeles. They suffer for months as internees at the Angel Island Immigration Station, the Ellis Island of the West, where they are harshly interrogated. Eventually they are reunited with their husbands and their new family, and learn, with great difficultly, to adjust to life in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.

Lisa See explores the strong relationship between the sisters, and the importance of family in the Chinese American culture. The Chinese encounter tremendous prejudice from the moment they enter the United States, through WWII and during the Korean War, when the North Koreans are assisted by the Communist Chinese government. The McCarthy era proves to be even worse, as patriotic Chinese-Americans are persecuted for being spies for Mao and The Peoples Republic of China. The Louie family persist, however, and try to obtain as much of the American dream for themselves and their children as possible.

This is a wonderfully rich historical novel. The in-depth character development is extraordinary. Ms. See’s writing style is tight, fluid, and very descriptive. The author is a Chinese-American, (1/8 Chinese), and grew up in Los Angeles, spending much of her time in Chinatown. She has also traveled throughout China, to the modern cities and the most remote regions of the country. Lisa See has become one of my favorite authors and I have read everything she has written.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 345 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (May 26, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lisa See
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our review of PEONY IN LOVE and SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN

Bibliography:

• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005)
• Peony in Love (June 2007)
• Shanghai Girls (May 2009)
• Dreams of Joy (May 2011)

Red Princess Mystery Series

• Flower Net (1997)
• The Interior (1999)
• Dragon Bones (2003)

Nonfiction:

• On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1996)

“Sons are the foundation of a woman’s self. They give a woman her identity, as well as dignity, protection, and economic value. They create a link between her husband and his ancestors. This is one accomplishment a man cannot achieve without the aid of his wife. Only she can guarantee the perpetuation of the family line, which, in turn, is the ultimate duty of every son. This is the supreme way he completes his filial duty, while sons are a woman’s crowning glory. I had all this and I was ecstatic.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Jana L. Perskie (MAY 26, 2009)

Snow Flower and The Secret Fan is an epic tale which chronicles the lives of two Chinese women, Lily and Snow Flower. Set in a remote area of Hunan Province, Lily was born in 1823, “on the fifth day of the sixth month of the third year of Emperor Daoguang’s reign.” During her lifetime, Lily lives through the reigns of four emperors. Most Chinese girls had their feet bound and spent their lives in seclusion in nineteenth century China. Isolated and illiterate, they were not expected to think or to express emotions. They were expected to bear sons. However, the fortunate women living in Hunan villages of the Jian-yong region were exempt from some of this harsh oppression. They were taught to write a special women’s language and they were allowed, on occasion, to form special friendships.

This deeply affecting novel begins with Lily, an eighty-eight year-old woman, and our narrator, who looks back over her life with bitterness and regret. She is haunted by memories of the past, by actions and events she cannot change. And she remembers, above all else, her laotong friend Snow Flower. “This special relationship formed by two girls, is made by choice for the purpose of emotional companionship and eternal fidelity. A marriage is not made by choice and has only one purpose — to have sons.” Often “this special friendship would be formed through an intermediary, like a matchmaker, much like an arranged marriage. Women of suitable birthdays, ages, backgrounds and birth-signs would be paired this way in a bond of exclusive sisterhood that would last a lifetime and would survive marriage, child-birth and widow-hood. A laotong relationship would be rarely renounced or broken.”

The people in Lily’s village now call the venerable woman, “one who has not yet died.” For her entire life she longed for love, although as a girl and later as a woman, she knew it was not right to expect it. As a third child, a second worthless girl, her mother looked upon her as a temporary visitor who was just another mouth to feed, another body to dress, until she went to her husband’s home.

At the age of six, Lily never dreamed of sharing a laotong relationship. But one day, the town’s foremost matchmaker, Madame Wang, visits Lily’s family and seeks to examine the child, primarily inspecting her yet unbound feet. Madame proclaims that Lily’s feet are not developed enough to be bound at this time. “The girl is indeed very lovely but golden lilies are far more important in life than a pretty face. A lovely face is a gift from heaven, but tiny feet can improve social standing.” She suggests that Lily’s mother and aunt do their best to educate the girl in traditional ways. If she learns well, she might be eligible to marry into a well born family in the village of Tongkou. Madame Wang also speculates that Lily may be eligible for a laotong relationship.

During the next year, Lily is taught the two Confucian ideals which govern a woman’s life. The first is the “Three Obediences: when a girl obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband, when a widow obey your son.” The second is the Four Virtues: ” Be chaste and yielding, calm and upright in attitude; be quiet and agreeable in words; be restrained and exquisite in movement; be perfect in handiwork and embroidery.” Most importantly, Lily’s aunt taught her the secret women’s writing Nu Shu. Believing women to be inferior, men disregarded this new script, and it remained unknown for centuries. Nu Shu, which is Chinese for “women’s writing,” was once written and sung by many of the women in Hunan villages.

When Lily turns seven, it is time to bind her feet, a symbol for the subjugation of women in China. A perfect foot should be shaped like a perfect lotus bud and be no longer that the length of a thumb. This perfection is called the Golden Lotus. “Every pair of small feet costs a bath (kang) of tears.” It is at this time that Madame Wang returns and tells the family that she has found a well-matched laotong relationship for the girl. Lily and Snow Flower are seemingly alike in all ways. The most important relationship in the girls’ lives is about to begin and they are only seven years-old. Snow Flower has composed a poem of introduction for Lily, in Nu Shu, written within the tiny folds of a silk fan. Their friendship is sealed and they become “old sames.”

As years pass, through arranged marriage, childbirth, war, rebellion, famine, drought, loneliness and suffering, the bond between the two becomes stronger and they find happiness and solace in each other. Lily is blessed by good fortune. Snow Flower is not. Their friendship of over 30 years takes a turn for the worse. Although both friends are born under the sign of the horse, they are really quite different in spirit and in circumstances, and these differences become more marked by age and fate. Lily is practical and very traditional. It is easier for her to accept her subservient role, given her good fortune with a husband and many sons. Eventually her position is elevated to “Lady Lu,” a respected community leader. However, she becomes limited in her ability to love Snow Flower. She can love her laotong “as a man would, valuing her only for following men’s rules.” Snow Flower, on the other hand, is a “horse with wings” who attempts to fly over life’s constrictions. Now Lily laments that she didn’t understand that “the bold horse of Snow Flower’s childhood had been broken in spirit” by so much oppression. Lily was “stubborn enough to believe she could fix a horse that has gone lame.”

I have read all of Lisa See’s novels and this is one of my favorites. I was really moved by the story of these two women and by their fortitude living in such a terribly repressive, misogynistic environment.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 753 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks (May 26, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lisa See
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our review of PEONY IN LOVE Our review of  SHANGHAI GIRLS

Bibliography:

• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005)
• Peony in Love (June 2007)
• Shanghai Girls (May 2009)
• Dreams of Joy (May 2011)

Red Princess Mystery Series

• Flower Net (1997)
• The Interior (1999)
• Dragon Bones (2003)

Nonfiction:

• On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1996)