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.
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.
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 