Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
A literary dream, that’s what this novel segmented into stories, felt like. Dear Chrysanthemums floats. There is something reminiscent in this novel of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a kind of immortal quality that flows one life into another, connects what appear to be disparate loci — combined with a historicity that reminds me of Jung Chang’s seminal, biographical, non fiction work, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China about Chang’s mother and grandmother, women who lived and survived China’s imperial demise, revolution, Japanese occupation, and Communist Cultural Revolution.
The stories in this novel, seemingly unconnected at first, reveal an intimate connection in the end: the women who feature in them are ordinary women, servants, daughters, mothers. They are separated by time and space, but their desires and ambitions, fueled by the need to become individuals in their own right, fuse them together. There is tension between the women of each story, but there is also connection.
The novel crosses continents, spanning the globe from China to France, and across time. Each generation of woman encounters a different kind of struggle, but a struggle all the same, and the story of each them reveals a common desire to realize who they are and what they want from life and from the circumstances of their lives.
History plays a role here, shaping where the women begin and where they end, the trajectories of their journeys. Colonialism, conflict, and war shape their migrations, that is, their physical and metaphysical, subjective journeys towards themselves. The women in these stories are bound by history inasmuch as they are bound to each other and to their own individual desires.
For those who love historical fiction, literary layers to excavate, and strong and flawed female characters, this is the novel for you.
The Master is a stark novel, the kind that is absent of luxurious words and descriptions, but whose minimal lines imply a lush intellectual interior may lie beyond the text, if the reader is willing to linger on the line just a little longer than necessary.
The protagonist is Zhuang Zhou (also known as Zhaungzi), an actual historical figure, a Chinese philosopher who lived circa 369 BCE to 286 BCE and contributed greatly to the philosophy of Taoism. He is the eponymous master of this novel. It begins with his childhood and recounts the fictionalized events of his life, with especial attention to Zhaung’s moments of philosophical enlightenment. Zhuang is propelled, by his choice or by the whims of others, from one kingdom to another, finding his life and livelihood tied to the court, a recipient of a benefice from the king. In some periods of his life he welcomes this privileged position, living the abstracted life of the mind. At other times he rejects this and delves into more material pursuits. His experiences lead him to write the piece of scholarship he is known for, The Zhuangzi.
The novel reads like an ancient epic moving swiftly from one event to another. It does allow the reader some interiority into Zhuang’s mind, but only his, and only insofar as it pertains to his judgements on morality and ethical behavior. This is not a personal account of the interiority of his life in an emotional sense; the reader should not expect entree into Zhuang’s feelings, so much as his intellectual musings on morality and correct ways ruler should govern. (Indeed, the reader may get the impression Zhuang was a less than stellar parent and romantic lover.) Rambaud delivers the character with a kind of detachment, as if merely filtering a series of observations for the benefit of the reader and for the reader to analyze and judge Zhuang for themselves.
The purpose of the novel seems to be less focused on the man than his scholarship. I have the distinct impression I am meant to walk away with a fuller view of what the sage intended for us to understand about Taoism. But I admit, I was less impressed with Zhuang’s heavy handed pedagogy and deliberate elusiveness, and so the lesson missed me.
As a result, this reader notices a pedantic aspect to the book, which while it performs the conventions of Chinese philosophical writing authentic to its setting and protagonist, may read as supercilious to the modern reader. But then again, the philosophy of ethics is about passing judgement and imposing moral watermarks on society, so… I am left wondering if a book on a topic like this can ever be written without an element of condescension baked into it. If so, Rambaud is excused from any accusation of arrogance; indeed, Rambaud’s role in this novel is exemplary otherwise.
Rambaud’s portrayal of Zhuang follows an expected patriarchal narrative that is likely accurate; we are not given any historical evidence that the real Zhuang was a feminist, after all. To portray him as such would have been inauthentic (if satisfying as a disruption, a revolution). We can understand Rambaud’s role here as a messenger. His prose is beautiful in its sparseness; with few words an image of Zhuang — not his physical being but his essence — is apparent to the reader, as are his friends who accompany him, betray him, befriend him on the journey of his life. Rambaud delivers the tensions of the social landscape of ancient China well, without romanticizing or Orientalizing the place or people. It is a harsh world: peasants live and die at the whims of their lords, people live and die at the whims of nature via its tantrums in the form of floods or droughts. Rambaud transports the reader to this moment and place well.
Overall, The Master is an enjoyable read, one that informs and does what historical fiction ought to do: transport the reader across time.
Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides under China’s Global Rise by Monica Liu
It’s been a minute since I’ve read an ethnography — and enjoyed it in the way I enjoy fiction. Liu does an amazing job making her subjects tangible for her reader and weaving story into the reality of her research. The result is brilliant academic anthropology; a portrait of women’s lives in modern China that transports the Western/Western-based reader into that world. This is a work suitable for all adult readers, those interested in the minute theoretical discussions of academia as well as a more general audience, those interested in simply knowing and witnessing a way of life foreign to their own.
Liu’s ethnography takes us to modern China and into the micro-world of online dating. The reader is specifically given entree into the kind of dating world that has been typically derided as disempowering for women, fostering unequal relationships between Western men and Asian women (or really women of color or those from less wealthy economies): (E)mail Order Brides. The popular narrative depicts the men as wielding both physical, material, and financial power over the women. The men “call the shots” and the women come a-running, lacking agency to refuse or to determine the parameters of the relationship.
Liu’s major point, and the one that makes this ethnography so appealing, is that this is absolutely not an accurate understanding of the power dynamics in China’s e-mail order bride and online dating world. I won’t give away Liu’s evidence or the ways in which Liu reveals this to the reader; that would spoil the fun of reading this! But suffice it say, Liu shows us how much more nuanced reality is.
Chinese women — and those of a particular age, class, and circumstance — possess far more agency and power in these relationships than we are trained to believe. As an Asian woman with East Asian descent, I was particularly intrigued by Liu’s work. In my own American world, women of my race and ethnicity remain stereotyped as submissive wives/girlfriends/spouses, as heteronormative sexual objects, or as “dragon ladies” or worse… simply invisible. Liu’s work was eye-opening and refreshing.
Liu’s work suggests a new world order in terms of Chinese gender and gender identity is coming, although, we should not expect revolutionary ideas necessarily. There are aspects of Liu’s findings that suggest the patriarchy is still strong in China, that the new world order is merely a reworking of it to fit into modern context. I don”t mean to be teleological, but “we have a long way to go” is still a valid comment.
The book is divided into short, easily digestible chapters, each one taking on a different perspective of the women studied. Liu discusses their class, their age, their personal goals in systematic form, allowing the reader to grasp the diversity of Chinese women in this world, from those who own the dating business to those who work for them, and of course, the women who are its customers and consumers. The men too, Western and Chinese, are included in this study, though their perspectives and voices are often filtered through the women. Geographically, Liu takes us into the heart of urban China, but also brings us along to America so we are able to follow along the full migration pathway of some of the women. Liu’s book possesses breadth in multiple ways.
I’ll be honest; the first 60 pages of this novel did not impress me. There was nothing wrong specifically, it’s just that nothing stood out to me in terms of character development or plot. But persistence paid off and by the end of the book I was in tears, ugly crying over the lifetime of grief, loss, and intergenerational trauma that history forced on the characters. This is a book I will never part with; I want my children and grand children to read this book.
The novel begins in the 1930s when China has been ravaged by European encroachments on its sovereignty; internal fractures between peasants, warlords, and the rising middle class; and the Japanese, who are gaining ground and support for their own imperializing campaigns. The Dao family are much like many others of their class: they own an antiques business, they are merchants living prosperous urban lives. Then the Japanese arrive and they are forced to flee. Meilin and her young, suddenly fatherless son, Renshu escape with her brother-in-law, her husband’s brother, Dao Longwei and his wife, Wenling and their two daughters. But the war continues and despite Longwei’s protection, Meilin and Renshu are separated from the other Dao family members.
The war with the Japanese slides into World War II and then into China’s Civil War. The seams between these conflicts are invisible to those like Meilin and Renshu who survive in the semi-peaceful interstices and spaces between them. The novel traces their journey across space and time, from China to the United States, and is marked by the people and things they lose along the way. This sense of loss — particularly of the loss of family, identity, and belonging — is the fulcrum around which the novel revolves.
Meilin, Renshu, and eventually Renshu’s daughter, Lily narrate their own and the Dao family story across several decades, three generations who experience the their subjective transnational, migration history and the larger, tragic events of Chinese history very differently. The reader is given a glimpse into living wounds of war, the kind that fester long after the battle has been lost, a world in which those who bear the brunt of war are not the combatants but the bystanders, even the truly innocent, those as yet unborn at the time of war. Like Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (which I read, but did not review here), Mother of Strangers by Suad Amiry, and Moth by Melody Razak this is a story of the effects of war and politics on those who had little to do with battle.
Loss and the grief of never being able to “go back” to be again what you once were, to have what you once had, and the especially painful suffering of being a transnational person, an immigrant belonging to two places at once and never fully to any one of them is a key theme in the novel. This is embedded in the title of the novel, which is premised on a scroll that Meilin inherits from her husband and a story she draws from it and tells to her son. In each their own ways, Meilin, Renshu, and Lily can never truly be whole in the way they want. History imposes on them, forces them to be split, to grieve for something or some part of them they cannot have, cannot be.
In comparison to Moth and Mother of Strangers, Peach Blossom Spring is less literary in prose and style, but no less powerful or profound. Fu’s style and language is more accessible to the casual reader of historical fiction; it is succinct, but deeply emotionally evocative. Indeed, the emotional build up is slow and steady. I didn’t realize how attached I’d become to the characters until the end, when events forced me to confront the idea of losing them. Fu is a shrewd and talented writer, and the emotional cuts her words make leave tender scars.
Although those first 60 pages did leave me wondering where exactly events were heading… I now wonder if that lull was deliberate. Perhaps the explosion of my interest performative of the dramatic effect of war on the characters. The lull before the storm…
Yueran’s prose in Cocoon is to die for. I cannot express how effortless it was to read this book; opening it and laying eyes on the page was all I had to do and Yueran did the rest. It was like being carried on a gentle wave down a winding river.
That said, it was a very long, slow-moving river at times and often I found it hard to track with the direction Cocoon was taking me. I grasped that there was a mystery, but the typical sense of urgency a thriller engenders was missing here, lost in the literary focus on the characters and their interior narratives. It was, for me, both a deeply satisfying for that reason and also frustrating in that it wove around the plot circuitously. I still cannot decide how much I enjoyed the novel or the degree to which I was disappointed by it.
The novel spans three generations of two families, their histories twisted together by the events of China’s Cultural Revolution and communist regime. The characters have fallen into the chasms created by the divisive policies of the Cultural Revolution and it is their reconciliation with that fact which the reader witnesses. There are mundane tragedies: a father and son estranged by the shifting values, a marriage begun out of spite, a wife abused, a child abandoned. Then there is the mutual tragedy — a crime — which threatens both families’ futures, an act that arose out of the political climate of the Cultural Revolution. This is the great mystery of the novel. What was that horrific crime? Why and how could it traverse down through generations?
The two narrators are the 3rd, latest generation of these two families, the grandchildren of the Chinese Old Guard and the children of the “sent down” youths of the revolution. They are childhood friends and enemies simultaneously, caught in the mess of their families’ tragedy. The fallout of China’s cultural and political upheaval is told through their eyes. Through their perspective we see the actions and feel the torments of their parents and grandparents and the effect of these massive cultural shifts on familial cohesion.
They are the generation that grew out of and yet distant to China’s traumatic history. Theirs is a moment of a different upheaval: China’s return to a capitalist society, the abandonment of the austerity of the 1960s and 1970s. The novel dwells on their generation’s angst as well: the shifting ideas of sex, love, and success.
This is an epic multigenerational tale, filled with characters that are so perfectly flawed as to be real. The meandering path through their traumas, their lives, and their losses is well worth the long walk.
Lost in the Long March: A Novel by Michael X. Wang
If you love multigenerational historical novels, the kind that invoke profound and simultaneous sensations of sadness, regret, and compassion or which bring to light uncomfortable truths about ourselves, our objects of love, our innermost desires, then Lost in the Long March is for you.
At first pass, Lost in the Long March did not grip me; the first few chapters were interesting, but did not give a clue to the deeper nuances that would come later. I am glad I persevered and read on; I was rewarded. By the last page I was very nearly in tears. There is deep heart-wrenching pain in this novel, the kind that is brought on by very common, mundane processes, in this case, the heartbreak of being a parent, the heart ache for the love of one’s child.
Wang’s novel is about the banal horrors of war; not the violence of combat, but the long arm of suffering that extends beyond the battlefield, long after the skirmish is over, when the victor is fooled by the passing of time into believing that they have won. They have not. Lost in the Long March revolves around the conflicts of the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communists (the Long March occurred in 1934-1935) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945); but this is really a novel about compassion and humanity and the ways in which wars and political movements can destroy them or create situations for their manifestation. Friendship, love, connection, loyalty — the interconnections between people — this is the core of this novel.
It is Wang’s unwavering focus on this universal core of the human experience which makes the novel so powerful, so moving, so profound. Wang’s prose delivers the message with perfect pacing and with ease; the prose is succinct, but the words and the silences Wang leaves between them could cut open a vein with deadly accuracy. On occasion, it took this reader a moment or two to feel the new wound, so sharply and subtly were the words and their meaning delivered. By the time I reached the end of the novel, as Wang came to the story’s inevitable end, I was unsure if I could survive it. I will not give the ending away, but I will say that it did leave this reader in a state of metaphorical exsanguination.
Lost in the Long March is well-worth the grief. As with many good books, it is the heavy sense of loss they inflict which is the reader’s gain.
A Map for the Missing: A Novel by Belinda Huijuan Tang
This novel is about loss, many different kinds of loss through death or ill luck, through forces of politics and history beyond our own or anyone’s individual control. It is about loss as a natural outcome of growth and change. It is about loss and its inscrutable, unshakeable companion, grief. It is also about the successors to loss: acceptance, perspective, renewal.
The story begins with a mystery and an immediate confrontation with loss. Yitian, a middle aged Chinese professor of mathematics who lives and works in the United States, finds himself on the calm end of a frantic phone call with his mother who announces that his father has gone missing. The remainder of the novel revolves around this event. This is the first loss, an obvious one.
But as the story unfolds and Yitian returns to China to solve this mystery, help his mother, and locate his father, it becomes clear this is only the last of many that have come before. The novel moves fluidly from the present into the deep past, into Yitian’s childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood.
We encounter the loss of worlds that no longer exist: China pre-1949, before Mao and the Cultural Revolution stripped Chinese culture down to a party line; China in the throes of the Cultural Revolution when young men and women were “sent down” youths, cast out of towns and cities and abandoned in the countryside, their personal desires and ambitions beaten out of them; China of the 1980s in its easing up of strict communist restrictions on lifestyle and living.
As Tang Yitian re-engages with China and the people of his past, the reader experiences with him the loss of his past. In that past is death of different kinds. There is literal death, but also metaphorical death — of love, romance, family cohesion. We encounter loss and grief as disappointment. So often disappointment is overlooked as a form of loss, but Tang’s A Map for the Missing makes a profound case for it here. The repeated disappointments that life deals us are obstacles in our path, they are barriers that prevent us from manifesting into reality the image of ourselves we see in our heads. Yitian’s wife experiences this. So does Hanwen. So too do the elder Tang men.
We also see the tale unravel from the point of view of those in Yitian’s past, specifically Hanwen, a young woman, one of the “sent down” youths. In some ways, A Map for the Missing is a tale of these two characters and how their encounter, brief and powerful, shaped their lives.
This is a novel of how loss shapes our lives. And because of that, the novel is less bleak than it might seem at the outset. There is a hopefulness embedded in it. Perhaps this is hinted at in the promise of its title. A map leads to a destination, doesn’t it? It rescues the lost. It is simply a matter of reading the map, learning the topography and the legend and its scale. Yitian’s journey lasts only a few weeks in real time, but it is really a deep delve into his past of several decades; it is on this journey into the past that he learns how to read the map.
A Map for the Missing takes us with Yitian and the other characters on their trips through memory. Belinda Huijuan Tang’s prose is a delicate vehicle for the reader’s ride. The reader will barely feel the movement as they are shuttled through the novel from one moment to another, from one story to another, the past, the present, back again. Her prose flows. The chapters flow. Tang’s description of place, perhaps foreign to some readers, fits the mood of the novel; it is sparse in parts, but succinct, delivering an image for the reader’s mind in a sweep of few words. The characters too are real, even if their histories and cultures might differ from the average English-reading audience; they are easily recognizable across cultures. The men and women of Tang’s novel are grounded in a specifically Chinese history and culture, but they are also relatable as mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, teenagers, young adults, wives, and husbands.
The reader will travel with these characters, witnessing Chinese history and their lives silently. At the end of this book, the reader cannot help but feel like they’ve gone somewhere familiar and alien. All of us know this story, we know this journey; it may be one we’ve taken before or one that we know we should take ourselves — or one we might be forced to undertake, like some of the characters here. You, Reader, will feel exhausted, but you’ll also feel… hopeful.
A Map for the Missing is a wandering worth the taking. for both the destination and the experiences along the way.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 