The short version of my reaction to this book is: a three-generation saga made up of some powerful sections, observations, and especially details, mixThe short version of my reaction to this book is: a three-generation saga made up of some powerful sections, observations, and especially details, mixed with science fiction, forced into a structure that works against it.
I found the most engaging section by far was the third, Mei's story of surviving being born dirt-poor in China on the eve of Mao's "improvements," her survival of the brutal years of Mao's utter failure at environmental and economic reform, followed by the mad brutality of the Red Guard era. She became a scientist in spite of these difficulties, while enduring a horrible marriage; at that point, the narrative begins to break up as the first two sections are jumbled in via some high end business dealings.
The book began with Mei's daughter Lily as an unpaid intern. There is a quick, rather synopsis of a whirlwind romance. Then the narrative cuts that off to focus on Lily's son Nick, whose section seemed the most unmoored from the rest, in spite of Nick's determination to connect with his grandmother.
Emotionally the story was all over the place; as soon as I'd be drawn into one character's story, the rug was pulled out and I was plunged into scattered anecdotes of another. Meanwhile, the story threads of the previous section are left dangling, unresolved, including an awkward inclusion of what I guess was maybe magical realism? But it served no purpose in the story: without it, the story would be exactly the same.
I did like the last line, but because the emotional threads had been so snarled, it engendered only a brief smile rather than any sense of resolution. The question "Why? What happened?" once again almost overshadowed memory of the details of Mei's life in particular, which I found the strongest part of the book.
But then I'm old, and I remember the horrifying news smuggled out of China about teenagers my own age busy brutalizing the country right back to the Stone Age. I wonder if younger readers will be more involved with the more modern times, and Lily's and Nick's part of the story.
So: a jumble of a review about a structural jumble of a book. Is it worth reading? Absolutely! Despite my impatience with what I consider a messy structure, the individual elements were absorbing and the Chinese paradigm overlying the "American" dream is very much worth pondering.
Having been immersing myself in Asian (Chinese especially) historical media and literature for the past eight years, I was so excited to grab this vivHaving been immersing myself in Asian (Chinese especially) historical media and literature for the past eight years, I was so excited to grab this vivid, cheerfully irreverent homage to Chinese mythology, especially the fantastical tales. This is A.Y. Chao's debut, first of a series, and I am so looking forward to more!
Our narrator is Lady Jing, ward of Big Wang, the King of Hell--who rules the mythic world that overlies thirties Shanghai. I've now seen enough series and films (including film clips from the actual period) set in thirties Shanghai, to salute the research that went into evoking an amazing period in China's very long history. Thirties Shanghai was a meeting and amalgam of different cultures, each gleefully borrowing from the others to try them on, resulting in an exhilarating period that, unfortunately was all too soon overshadowed by world war.
This is a perfect setting for a story that borders the mythic world with a trip across the river.
Lady Jing is nearly 100 years old, and, typical for Xianxia, that means she's a young thing teetering on the verge of adulthood. In Xianxia, a cosmos full of gods and demons and weird spirits, time measure is in centuries and millennia. She's a "mongrel," or so her horrible relations insist, which is why she's the ward of the King of Hell. She's half huli, or nine-tailed-fox, and half vampire. She's been raised by a couple of venerable mythic figures in Big Wang's Court. ("Wang" by the way, means "king") She's feisty and mischievous and burgeoning with nascent power, but like many adolescents on the verge of adulthood, she's too impatient to sit for lessons. Especially as it seems everyone in Hell's court hates her guts, and there are powerful figures related to her who go out of their way to be cruel. With the emotional fallout you'd expect.
Lady Jing is requested by Big Wang to meet a mortal who is proposing a bank for the undead. Big Wang is interested in modernizing Hell, which means creating a bank. So Jing meets Tony Lee, a mortal who is clearly (except to inexperienced Jing) smitten with her, pretty much from the start.
Adventures ensue, with plenty of earthy observations by Jing, as she painfully comes to terms with aspects of her birth and early years. Perhaps symbolic, she fights hard against wearing the qipao, the gorgeous silk gown of the period--skin-tight, it looks spectacular on the right body, at the cost of moving. Or even breathing freely. And Jing, trained in martial arts, needs to be able to move.
I won't say any more than that. I galloped through the book, delighting in Jing and her adventures, and her slow, wary approach to growing up and into her powers. Along the way we get a thorough grounding in Chinese myth; what I loved most, I think, was Mr. Lee's reason for coming to Big Wang in the first place. That resonated with so many of the Chinese stories I've been inhaling over these past few years. Likewise, I loved the scattering of Chinese vocabulary through the story, exulting in the fact that I recognized all these words.
The result was a satisfying immersion in a world I want to revisit, leaving me looking very much forward to Lady Jing's further adventures....more
"When she left, her friends had called it abroad, but irene had known it wasn't. China was many things--traffic and mountains and the brush of ink ove"When she left, her friends had called it abroad, but irene had known it wasn't. China was many things--traffic and mountains and the brush of ink over paper, emperors and innovation and the heavy hand of an authoritarian government--but she would never call it foreign."
That sums up the clear-eyed yet loving way Grace Li describes China, from the various perspectives of her five college-age Chinese-American students, who are recruited by an extremely wealthy Chinese person to loot five important Chinese works of art that had once sat in the Summer Palace, but had been taken to various Western museums, and bring them back to China.
The story itself is a fantasy without magic. If the mechanics of a heist are your especially thing, aspects of this tale will drive you nuts (the students using Zoom to plan their heist being typical) but if you can hand wave that off, and sink into the characters, and the grace notes when talking about China's amazingly long and difficult history, then this might be the book for you.
It does start off slowly, as the author takes her time in establishing the backstory for each of her five students. I think I was past the thirty percent mark before they began getting to their first heist. But before then was the trip to China, which I relished, and many elegant turns of phrase.
The ending is a bit of a fantasy, too, but at heart this entire story is a plea for art to go back to the country of origin.
I kept thinking as I read this book that the author had to be my age, and had as a teen been part of the Red Guard--or endured their terrible violenceI kept thinking as I read this book that the author had to be my age, and had as a teen been part of the Red Guard--or endured their terrible violence first person, while living out in the Chinese countryside at the time. It's the details--the folk tales that endured among the peasants in spite of "the Four Olds" being forbidden, the folk tales that were given a red twist, the superstitions, and above all, the survivor-thinking that comes of generations of grinding poverty and watching one's family, and village, die of starvation, war, etc.
Turns out she researched the book more than ten years. Ten years on this impeccably written gut punch of a novel. It shows.
The basic storyline is a teenage peasant chosen by Chairman Mao's procurer to be a fresh "dance hall" girl, who gets picked by seventy-plus-year-old Mao to be a plaything as well as a tool against political enemies. Mao's actions are nothing new--this is what emperors did for thousands of years, in having a constant flow of teenage concubines* whose lives were often as disposable as any other service animal, while on the surface there was great political hoo-rah about the girls' dedication and importance to the party and how heroic they would be regarded if they died in service to the Cause.
Not an easy read, but gracefully written, with resonatingly real emotion and devastating detail. Wow.
*the West was no better in its misogyny, just different paradigm
I wish I could turn back the clock to when I was a sixth grade teacher because I would so be reading this book out loud to my class, and enjoying the I wish I could turn back the clock to when I was a sixth grade teacher because I would so be reading this book out loud to my class, and enjoying the discussions I know it would spark.
Mazy Chen is eleven, living with her mom in Los Angeles when they suddenly drop everything to drive back to the tiny town of Last Chance, Minnesota, to visit the grandparents Maizy has only seen once on a single occasional memorable for its discomfort.
Her Oma and Opa run a Chinese restaurant, the only one in the tiny town. And there's a reason her grandparents, both of Chinese ancestry, go by the German nicknames for grandparents, which we find out later.
At the beginning, Maizy is not happy to be stuck in a dull little town at a restaurant that is the center of her grandparents' lives; Opa is ill, and it's Maizy's job to keep him occupied so that he doesn't get stressed with work.
Once Maizy starts getting to know Opa, the book opens up like a lotus, one absorbing petal after another. I especially appreciated the little snips of ancestor "Lucky" Chen's life, beginning in China in 1853, then coming to America, as told by Opa to Maizy.
The prose is simple without ever being simplistic (In my family, sometimes what's not said takes up more space than what is), the characters a wide range from repellent to lovely, with plenty of complexity between; the pacing is brisk enough to keep me turning the pages until I suddenly found myself done. I can see a kid reader racing through this book.
I think what I appreciated most was Yee's clarity of vision. She gives us characters representing all the warts and foibles of human nature, with a strong glimmering of compassion tying everything together. This is not a flowers and rainbows book of everybody simple and happy, which can hit false notes, especially for kids today who hear their parents' worries and who might have family stories about racial slurs, or have been hit with them themselves.
But it is also not one of those dreary seventies Problem Novels that (in my classroom experience) put more kids off reading than not, and also implied somehow that being other than white cis het was A Problem--not a message that is helpful to anyone.
The book is funny and scary by turns, thoughtful and wise, as adults as well as kids make mistakes and learn from them--or don't. I would have bought this in hardback for my classroom shelf. Two copies.
I hadn't heard of this series, pairing authors with classics for a "remix" but if the rest are like this one, sign me up.
My heart sank when I saw thatI hadn't heard of this series, pairing authors with classics for a "remix" but if the rest are like this one, sign me up.
My heart sank when I saw that it was written in present tense, but that seems to be the fashion in YA these days. It was far less awkward here than in many books I've read of late; after the initial jolt it became invisible, I was so immersed in the vivid depiction of southeast Asia in the early decades of the 1800s, the era of Zhen Yi Sao, the most successful pirates who ever lived--who happened to be a woman.
This is supposed to be a retelling of Treasure Island; Lee's take was so fresh that I forgot completely about the origin story as we get to know Xiang, who is eager to break away from the stifling village where she was sequestered, and test her abilities by running the tea house her mother owns.
Xiang misses the obvious clues that her mother is far more than she seems, she is so determined to prove herself--in spite of her mother's insistence she stay at home with her books and studies. One day she takes off to wander Canton, and meets a girl her own age, who turns out to be a thief. Xiang is hurt doubly, not just to find her father's precious pendant gone from around her neck, but that the first friend she had ever made turned out not to be one.
However, she meets Ahn again, and discovers that Ahn's mother runs a small fishing boat, but she is after a famous (infamous) treasure. Xiang runs away with them, and so the adventure begins
Lee has a sure hand with the details of the time. I was totally immersed in the wild life of the southeast sea coast at a volatile period of history. The characters were vivid, the pacing swift, and I loved the tentative, sometimes spiky friendship between Xiang and Ahn that gradually developed into something closer.
The climax is a real roller coaster of action and emotional highs and lows. I loved Xiang's arc--and Ahn's. I think Lee did a terrific job making these queer Asian heroines girls very much of their time, but accessible to the modern teen reader.
For a certain subset of readers who need trigger warnings (such as myself) about extreme harm to the helpless, the first ten pages need just that, as For a certain subset of readers who need trigger warnings (such as myself) about extreme harm to the helpless, the first ten pages need just that, as Liyan (known simply as "Girl") at age ten goes along with her mother, the village midwife, for the first time to assist at a birth. And disaster strikes. (view spoiler)[The mother births perfect twins, which then are killed because local beliefs think twins evil. Not only are the babies killed, the parents' house is burned to the ground and they are driven out of the village, the mother still grief-stricken and recovering from the birth. Another spoiler, she never recovers from that experience/ (hide spoiler)]
At that point, I had to put the book down for several days. I picked it up again because I had read a few bits from further in, which were so well-written, so vivid, so interesting, that I bought the book in the first place.
The rest is not quite as extremely painful, though there is some emotionally rough stuff as we get to know Liyan's people, the Akha, who live in the Yunnan heights. They are the peasants that Mao's reforms were supposed to help, but they are so poor, and so removed, that the changing political winds scarcely touch them--except that a former intellectual was assigned to for peasant reeducation, and becomes the only teacher the village knows. Otherwise the story could have taken place in the Tang Dynasty, or even earlier, and not in 1996: there is no electricity in the village, no sign of the 20th century.
But that teacher has found the rare student that makes the daily grind (and humiliation) worth it: Liyan. With Teacher Zhang's help, Liyan is pointed toward higher education. She already knows from that first experience that she does not want to become a midwife like her mother, though she does not question the extreme taboos and customs of her people. She falls in love at sixteen, which brings about more drastic experience, resulting in her leaving her child, with a single tea cake, at an orphanage.
But that daughter is never forgotten. After that, the daughter's life as she grows up in America, and Liyan's life as she becomes a tea master, get reported in swapping chapters. We get rapid glimpses of the continuing changes, and the fallout from those changes: Liyan, lonely, often walks in the park, where she and other single women are accosted by mothers who carry biographies of sons born during the One Child Policy, when everyone wanted a boy. Those boys now need wives, and the girls they ought to have grown up with are either growing up in adoptive families overseas or are dead, killed at birth or even before.
The novel is beautifully written, affording diamond-sharp glints of how lives are affected by political and economic growth, how the vast, slow dragon of Chinese culture inexorably persists, and adapts when it must. Along the way we get such vivid glimpses of individual lives that characters who only appear for a few paragraphs, or pages at most, linger in memory even after one reaches the end.
The led me to expect more of an adventure, but that aside, I found this to be a sharply realized, moody alt-China, in which dragons are a part of a seThe led me to expect more of an adventure, but that aside, I found this to be a sharply realized, moody alt-China, in which dragons are a part of a seriously drought-threatened culture.
Central, however, are not the dragons, but two guys who develop a relationship--one is a biracial researcher, the other an animal lover. The lens is appropriately smoky, creating a moody read, with vivid descriptions. The pacing is slow, and thoughtful. A gay-positive, interesting take on a China that never was.
If I had a complaint it would be that the emotional arc is somewhat muted, but this writer wields an admirably descriptive pen and I look forward to more from her.
This is a structurally complicated book, especially for a debut novel. I was impressed by how much story Butler managed to pack in, as our heroine, whThis is a structurally complicated book, especially for a debut novel. I was impressed by how much story Butler managed to pack in, as our heroine, who is half white, half Asian, has to not only navigate between these two cultures, but on top of that she must deal with a family breakup that created silence for the crucial years of her growing up.
The terms of a will draw her back to Taiwan, which otherwise she never wanted to see again. Along the way on her trip we meet family members (including her two very different half-sisters), elders as well as peers, and a reintroduction to Taiwan. Oh, and there is romance!
I got really involved in the story, though I had some misgivings, mostly centered on a pivotal character whose one-dimensional nastiness might edge a bit too close to stereotype. Especially given the title. (view spoiler)[(And was given an easy pass at the end, without us every truly understanding how the character got to be so Eeevil.) (hide spoiler)]
But the other characters make up for it, the food descriptions are delicious, and the glimpses of Taiwan were intriguing. I was impressed overall by this debut novel, and look forward to more from this author.
i have never played a video game, but when I saw that this novel was set in Chinese history, and written by a Chinese novelist, I grabbed it. Glad I di have never played a video game, but when I saw that this novel was set in Chinese history, and written by a Chinese novelist, I grabbed it. Glad I did.
I don't think it was completely successful, but in a way that showcases just how good the author is.
Shao Jun, the last of her clan, goes home after she training with the legendary assassin Ezio Auditore, to find everything destroyed. However, she cannot avenge her former brothers and renew the Brotherhood in China alone. She surrounds herself with allies and tries to defeat the Eight Tigers.
First off, she isn't the lone wolf who takes on the world type of hero. She needs to get and rely on allies. If you've read Water Margin, you might be reminded of how Song Jiang, who had the rep of the mightiest of heroes, actually spends a good deal of the four volumes getting allies to help him with each challenge.
The world is terrifically evoked, the martial arts styles impeccably described, and the characters are well drawn. Which brings me to the sense that it wasn't completely successful: I feel that the author was too constrained by the format of a gaming novel (which promises its reader non-stop battles) and so characterization and worldbuilding and themes kept trying to leak through. The result might be slowly paced for the gamer just looking for cool fights, and too mono-thread for a reader looking for a good spec fic novel that uses the Ming era for its springboard.
Still, an absorbing read, and makes me want to seek more of this author's work.
I had hoped that this was a straight translation of Zhang Dai’s writing. Instead, what we have is Jonathan D Spence’s view of the best of Zhang Dai’s
I had hoped that this was a straight translation of Zhang Dai’s writing. Instead, what we have is Jonathan D Spence’s view of the best of Zhang Dai’s writing, summarized through Spence’s views of Chinese history. It’s well-written, vivid, often elegiac, sometimes poignant, and occasionally comical. Apparently as Zhang Dai himself was.
Zhang Dai lived an unconventional life, lasting through most of the 1600s, which included the fall of Ming Dynasty just before mid-century. At that time he pretty much lost everything, having to leave home and run. Overnight, wealth to poverty, high social standing to low. The hardest loss for him was his helplessness to feed his scattered family.
The most persistent of his many enterprises was his writing. He wrote biographies of many of his family members, as was common at certain ranks through Chinese history, and then he set out to chronicle the Ming Dynasty, which was pretty much his master work.
He’s quite frank about how he spent his youth in pleasure trips, pursuing dramatic productions, and such things as seeking the perfect water for tea making. (He found his water, and wrote so well about it the leaves unfold like seeing a hundred white orchid flowers open their petals in a wave of snow, that people flocked to the site and ruined everything, including the water.)
Spence’s choices of quotations and his detailed summaries of Zhang Dai’s biographical sketches of his various relatives’ lives briefly but memorably bring them all to life. Zhang writes with that same honesty he related about his own life to his family, highlighting good and bad qualities.
One of the subjects I was interested in seeing was his recounting of the state of the imperial examinations of his time. He castigates the legalistic insistence on the infamous “eight-legged essays” and goes into the grinding misery of testing, the cronyism of grading and reciprocity among scholars then looking for government jobs.
It’s interesting to see through Spence’s summaries how the tension between Confucian ideals and Buddist and Daoist ideas inform Zhang’s society and government, especially his insights in why and how it came crashing down. Criticizing emperors was a risky business, but at the end of his life, when he was so poor he had to scrabble for rent of a place to life, he apparently didn’t think he had much to lose.
Overall an absorbing read, one I’ll come back to. ...more
Will have more to say when I finish the last volume.
There is so much less of the fantastic and the dream state in this volume, and so much more about Will have more to say when I finish the last volume.
There is so much less of the fantastic and the dream state in this volume, and so much more about social interactions at all levels of society. The volume overall has the feel of comedy of manners . . . which is surprising considering that two characters are nearly beaten to death, and then there are the suicides. But the writing is so engaging, the focus on poetry and flowers and the minutiae of day to day interactions, and the cast is full of women. What they do and think matters....more
Will have more to say when I finish the series. I have been swapping off this translation with the Gladys Yang translation (apparently done while a poWill have more to say when I finish the series. I have been swapping off this translation with the Gladys Yang translation (apparently done while a political prisoner); this translation probably takes more liberties, but is more engaging for a Western reader.
This first book really is dreamlike in its blend of the fantastic and everyday life, verging on comedy of manners. Unlike any of the other Chinese classics I've read so far, this one focuses right in on women, including the servants. There is an enormous cast, and a great deal of description in huge wodges at times, and for a Western reader the pacing is like following a meandering river rather than Act One Rising Action, but perseverance pays off....more
While researching early methods of making and firing ceramics, specifically porcelain, I stumbled across this book. While there was scant info about tWhile researching early methods of making and firing ceramics, specifically porcelain, I stumbled across this book. While there was scant info about the making of porcelain from the country that for centuries fashioned the world's best, I became absorbed for other reasons.
Huan Hsu, a journalist, and a first generation Chinese American, arrives in China to work at his uncle's tech company, but his real goal is to find his great-great grandfather's incredibly valuable porcelain collection, which the grandfather buried on his property before leaving ahead of the Japanese invasion.
Hsu is appalled at what he finds, he resents the Chinese, he barely speaks the language, which he despises, as much as he despises many of his relatives--and China, when he gets there. Before he can tackle his quest, that means learning enough of the language to interview his aging relatives, many of whom are in their eighties and nineties, children when it all happened. But it's not enough to learn the language, he also has to learn how to maneuver in Chinese (and Taiwanese) culture, which even after the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, still exhibits the thought patterns of old.
And so begins the story of his family, one relative at a time, one extended relation at a time--and one person at a time as the search both frustrates and widens. Everyone has reasons for what they tell him: his grandmother insisting he abandon the quest because it's dangerous, other relatives maintaining the treasure is long gone, vanished into Japanese pockets, into Kuomintang or Communist vaults, etc.
What the reader gets is a vivid history of what it was like to try to survive during the twentieth century, which was brutal for the Chinese people in a way that, sadly, isn't all that new. The impression that China still is very much an empire persists--and one person even iterates it, as Hsu and his interviewees delve into the past, and what it was like to run from the horror of Japanese atrocities just to later be persecuted by one's own government for utterly specious "reasons."
This is history one person at a time, building a picture that meshes with other books' descriptions of the culture and customs, from spitting in the street to how to handle officials and not have one's questions come back to bite you, or worse, your family.
As for what happened to the treasure, if you've been reading all the stories instead of skimming, you not only comprehend the seemingly abrupt ending, you are left thinking: yup, there it is. ...more
In the short preface to this book, first written in English in 1939, Lin Yutang says
What is a novel but "a little talk," as the name 'Xiaoshuo' impliIn the short preface to this book, first written in English in 1939, Lin Yutang says
What is a novel but "a little talk," as the name 'Xiaoshuo' implies? . . . This novel is neither an apology for contemporary Chinese life nor an expose of it . . . it is neither a glorification of the old way of life nor a defense of it. It is merely a story of how men and women in the contemporary era grow up and learn to live with one another, how they love and hate and quarrel and forgive and suffer and enjoy, how certain habits of living and ways of thinking are formed, and how, above all, they adjust themselves to the circumstances in this earthly life where men strive but the gods rule.
If I had to characterize it in the way we often see these days, I'd say it's a cross between Dream of Red Chamber (whose influence is definitely present) and Tolstoi's War and Peace. It begins around the time of the Boxer Rebellion, and we see some of the violence, but largely at a distance as we are drawn into the lives of two families.
The cast is huge, centering around Mulan and her families, both birth and her in-laws. There is even a huge manor with many gardens as we find in Dream. There are also loving descriptions of food, customs, clothing, and gardens as also found in Cao Xuexin's multi-volume novel (which I am still reading!). But this novel begins with violent change, and ends with even more violent change: the Japanese invasion of China. Sandwiched between are the lives of ordinary people as China goes through the revolutions of the first part of the twentieth century.
The novel is over 800 pages long, short by Chinese novel standards. (I've been working through all four* of the Classic Chinese Novels, the most modern of which is Dream, written in the mid 1700s. The others are several centuries older). To my uneducated view, Moment in Peking represents a blending of Eastern and Western novel styles, with a greater leaning toward the East: it's long, it's leisurely, there is an omniscient narrator who occasionally pops in to comment on the action. The structure is more like a flowing river, or a string of beads, than the three-act structure that Western readers absorb over a lifetime of reading Western lit.
At the beginning, as we begin to get to know Mulan and her family (plus what would become her married family, when they rescue her after she got lost, kidnapped, and sold) Lin Yutang paints a vivid picture of life at the very end of the Qing Dynasty, with its traditions steeped in Confucianism, but living in a centuries-long compromise with Daoism and Buddhism plus local religious spinoffs. And, on the horizon, a glimpse of that exotic religion: Christianity.
Some of those traditions have calcified, others shape lives and give it not only sense, but order, and grace. Only which traditions and customs are good and which are bad? It depends on the people living them. Lin Yutang breathes a sense of wisdom, tolerance, and even redemption into his characters, though bad things do happen.
And so forty-odd years pass as the adults age and the young people marry, get involved in various ways in the waves of revolution and change, and have kids. Those kids grow. By the end, I was deeply involved in all their lives--and so we crash into the Japanese invasion.
The Japanese do not come off well in this novel, fair warning. The invasion was still going on when it was written--and of course we are seeing the invaders, not ordinary Japanese citizens at home. I don't think most Westerners, who may know something about the horrific numbers of helpless victims of Hitler and Stalin, know much about the systematic savagery of the invasion of China, especially in the northeast. We see just enough of it in this story to drive home the emotional fallout, and to profoundly enhance the poignancy of the ending message, if one knows the history of China through the next fifty years. But lingering is the sense of hope Lin Yutang conveys, and a belief that human beings can be better, one decision at a time.
One of my projects as I advance into old age is to whittle down my library, and decide which books I'll keep for reread, and which I'll pass on. This one is a keeper.
*English translations of, and a simple Chinese version of the Journey to the West....more
Finally finished this four volume story. Typical of many early Chinese novels, there is debate about who the author really is, and there are differingFinally finished this four volume story. Typical of many early Chinese novels, there is debate about who the author really is, and there are differing versions of the text floating around. It does mention, once, the equally famous Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which I thought was an earlier work, but instead may have been written by the editor of this one.
The two have certain characteristics in common (I'm halfway through the first of three thick volumes of the Romance), but then all the Chinese novels I've read so far in translation are structured very differently than Western novels. Generalizing with leaps and bounds, Aristotelean structure is seeped into Western bones, whether Westerners have actually read any Aristotle or not. It's that three act form, with its attendant arcs, and built-in assumptions about what makes drama.
Spoiler Alert! The Chinese never read Aristotle. The novels I've read are structured like a flowing river, incident leading to incident, like streams feeding a river until it reaches its end. I imagine I can see the street storyteller experience underlying these novels, especially when the narrator abruptly appears to comment, and then recedes behind the characters again. Chapters end with foreshadowing, often a question, followed by, "Turn the page and you shall see."
This is a wuxi/xianxia novel in that it's about outlaws living on the margins of society--and, as in so many Jianghu tales, literally on the margin of a marsh. The generally accepted title means "on the edge of a marsh." The outlaws are assumed. Jianghu tales are far older than this one, which was written somewhere in the 1300s, about some actual incidents (rebellions) that happened a couple centuries earlier, about which many stories had become popular. One source I came across quoted a Chinese writer of a few centuries B.C. who complained bitterly about the popularity of Jianghu tales--how trite they were in his time!
The heirs of the Jianghu tale are the Hong Kong action movies, and the bones of some of the great series now, like Nirvana in Fire rely on these traditions. Think of them as the martial arts tradition, the wandering fighter who uses his weapon in defense of ordinary people--a Robin Hood.
Their persistent popularity has its own reflection in different types of tales in the West--at least, it seems to me, they rise out of that tension between the craving for order, which leads to a highly stratified society, which China tried to be in spite of its many internal struggles, and the stifling effect of the imposing of order, especially when distorted by greed and ambition. Deeply steeped in Confucian, Daoist, and also Buddhist thinking, Chinese government through the various dynasties strove to be orderly and benign, but we're talking about human beings here. (There are some who maintain that China is still an empire, despite the crashing end of the Qing in 1905: that Mao was an emperor, and Xi Jinping is one now, in spite of the Western suit and tie, and the various uses of "secretary" in Communist Party elite circles. The roots of these modest titles go straight back to the court titles in empire days.)
Anyway! What we have here is a scattershot narrative through the early volumes especially as the 108 outlaws of Song Jiang's group begin to accrete. Just about all of them are wronged by government officials or nobles (often the two combined into one), take to the outlaw life, and end up swearing allegiance to Song Jiang, who everyone has heard about as being righteous and loyal.
Song Jiang is an interesting figure. He actually doesn't fight all that much, in a four-volume novel that is 95% fighting. He doesn't even do most of his strategizing once the outlaws are forgiven and sent against enemies of the state, especially the tough and cruel criminal Fang La (who apparently really lived, and led a peasant rebellion--declaring himself a king). Song Jiang is praised for the fact that he never kills the innocent, and he respects men who are good to their mothers and fathers, yet when he goes after someone or other who kills or threatens his followers he is not satisfied to kill that man, but the narrative assures us that everyone in the enemy's household is slaughtered as well, "young and old," including servants and slaves, who had no say in anything. I'm guessing that this is the outlaw reflection of the imperial order to kill high level malefactors to the ninth generation.
Kinship is integral to Chinese society. Ancestor worship was, and is now, I gather, in spite of the cultural revolution, deeply embedded in its society. The names for different kin connections are complicated, part of one's identity. And in the Jianghu world, the outlaws address one another as brother, and Song Jiang as Big Brother. To the outlaws, staying true to one another is an admirable quality.
One of the interesting aspects of the story is the shifting loyalties--who switches sides and why. Song Jiang stays loyal to his band until the very end; when he is poisoned at the last by evil officials, he poisons his most faithful follower, the horrible yet somehow entertaining killer Black Whirlwind Li, knowing that the man would go on a killing spree following his death. And he tells him, and Li thanks him, loyal to the last. In spite of the fact that a goodly portion of the slaughtering in all four volumes was done by the whirling of his two axes.
Another aspect that I've observed in the older Chinese novels I've read in translation so far is that no one criticizes the emperor. If he does something stupid or evil, it was because he was led astray by evil ministers. When speaking to him, everyone assures him that any good deed or triumph is due directly to the emperor's personal good fortune or . . . we don't really have a word for it in English, but it seems integral to the shared agreement between subject and ruler that said ruler is chosen by Heaven.
There aren't many women in these books. And those few are, for the most part, negligible, or evil--especially the pretty ones. And yet not all. Ten Feet of Steel is a total badass, who Song Jiang rescues from the otherwise total slaughter of her family when they go against Song Jiang. One of Song Jiang's cruder outlaws, Stumpy Tiger, wanted a wife, so Song Jiang gives her to him. And apparently she stays loyal to him all the way through, fighting by his side, when she isn't in command of her own forces. I wish we could have seen her point of view even briefly, about all these events.
These brief glimpses of women, even the evil ones, furnish an idea of how women coped in such a society. Their lives are so easily disposed of by the men around them. It took machinations just to survive, much less to find happiness of their own. The author doesn't quite understand that, but he does feel, as Western knights did, that staying loyal to your brethren was good, and getting involved with women was a sure road to hell. Maybe it was the sure road to emotional hell? Or it split loyalties--you don't want to go out fighting when you are happy at home.
It took me a long time to read all four volumes, partly because of the scattered nature, but also the casual cannibalism. And the occasional vividly described torture. As we can get in Western medieval writings.
Overall it's entertaining, and many of the characters stick in the mind. There's also that sense of bonded brotherhood in the long, desperate campaign against Fang La, when roughly three-quarters of the band die by violence. The aftermath is interesting; so is the interweaving of magic into the fabric of the story, the ghosts. At one point one of the outlaws, having been killed, possesses his brother's body in order to finish off a foe....more
Four thousand years of history fitted into a single volume means there is going to be a great deal of summary, especially when the subject is China, wFour thousand years of history fitted into a single volume means there is going to be a great deal of summary, especially when the subject is China, which was developing written history when my own European ancestors were still running around in the woods.
So the question becomes, where to summarize and what details to include to illustrate one’s point? It’s for the expert to evaluate Wood’s choices in a judgment call. All I—a learner—can confidently say is that I got very involved in this book. I enjoyed great parts of it, specifically the details Wood chose from very recent archaeological finds that are shedding new light on China’s ancient past. Such as letters from homesick soldiers in the Qin Army and Han garrisons on Silk Road watchtowers, some written on sticks, others on silk, by monks, mid-range and low ranking officials, women, slaves.
Each dynasty has its illustrative detail, the highlights of its rule, and how it failed. There is plenty of attention paid to China’s geography, specifically the rivers, and how life rose and changed around these rivers—including the utter devastation when the rivers flooded or altered course.
Confucius is summarized, Mencius barely gets mentioned, but their legacy is worked through the summaries of the evolution of imperial government. I really appreciated the attention paid to the poets, both male and female, and the marvelous descriptions of ancient cities, such as Chang’An. There is also superlative focus on specific works of art that convey an idea of its time as well as its timeless beauty.
The astounding ructions of Chinese history in the twentieth century rightly would take up volumes, but Wood navigates his way by use of diaries, journals, and in more modern times, witness accounts. He includes everyone—grand families with long pedigrees going back centuries, even millennia, farmers, protestors.
I think my favorite bit was the vivid depiction of Song-era Kaifeng, and the description of the amazing scroll-painting “Festival on the River”—which is a highly detailed trip all through the city, from river bank to urban center and out. I would LOVE to see that in person—it’s as close to a time machine glimpse of the past as we can get.
Altogether an absorbing read, enjoyable in many places, heart-breaking in others: when China turned on itself in its wars, millions died, rivaling the profoundly disastrous effects of drought, quake, famine, flooding, and plague. Yet through it all the Chinese rose again and rebuilt, hearkening to their past, their thinking shaped by the enlightened views of ancient sages.
For an excellent, in-depth review Goodreads reviewer Grace Tjan does a much better job than I would, hampered as I am by how few of Yong/Cha's works hFor an excellent, in-depth review Goodreads reviewer Grace Tjan does a much better job than I would, hampered as I am by how few of Yong/Cha's works have been translated into English.
An American without reading-level Mandarin trying to delve into the long history of wuxia and xianxia is very much like trying to view a panorama through a keyhole. This book was fascinating on so many levels, though it was slow going. It has the structure of a dissertation, with long, jargon-laden sentences, and some very peculiar neologisms (like "narratorial" instead of "narrative") but I found it worth working my way through it slowly over a period of weeks.
Impressions I came away with: Jin Yong had steeped himself in the wuxia tradition. From the one novel I've read translated, and several media interpretations of his work, I can see the bones of wuxia tradition in the highly picaresque nature of his stories. But also, it seems, he was quite conscious of using jianghu tales in order to comment on current events--something that could be quite dangerous during the volatile sixties and seventies in mainland China. But this, too, seems to be a characteristic of wuxia: the tales that lasted the longest contain oblique commentary on their times.
This book was also interesting in how it traced Yong's use of his publishing medium (basically a tabloid, one of many published in Hong Kong) to foster his work through commentary on it, and letters from fans (whether actual fans or sock puppetry). Hamm traces the beginnings of the literary and academic world, which has also undergone dramatic sea changes in China, as they begin to grapple with Yong's legacy. The only phenomenon I can think of to compare him with in American literary landscape is Stephen King....more
I'm tagging this as Chinese-history because wuxia tales have been around so long that a famous Chinese statesman snarked about they overused back in tI'm tagging this as Chinese-history because wuxia tales have been around so long that a famous Chinese statesman snarked about they overused back in the first century B.C.
Wuxia, and xianxia, have been around for millennia, stamped out occasionally by this or that government, then reappearing in a form adapted to that particular cultural bend in the long, long river that is Chinese culture history. It's fascinating to watch how the evolution of such tales is a mirror reflecting cultural evolution.
The simplest definition of wuxia for Westerners is stories of chivalric wanderers who wander what they call the jiang hu, paying no attention to political boundaries, or the rigid hierarchy of imperial law. Some tales (xianxia) lean more toward the supernatural, involving a fascinating pantheon of gods, demons, mythological critters, and various types of humans, reflecting the substrate of the Buddhist cultivation toward enlightenment. Other tales are more ground-bound, basically martial arts stories that Westerners might define as picaresque, as Eastern and Western concepts of plot can vary pretty widely.
Anyway, these stories have been around a very long time, but until very recently, they flew entirely under the radar of Westerners as so very few have been translated. With the growing demand for more diversity in fiction, I've been delighted to discover Chinese writers writing in English, being translated into English, and conversely, Westerners discovering wuxia and xianxia tales and fashioning their own stories, blending Eastern and Western tropes and ideas.
Such is Robin Shortt's madly fast-paced, pungently vivid wuxia-influenced tale, The Marten and the Scorpion.
The Martens are a street gang in Samarkand. Darya is low on the totem pole, a pickpocket trying desperately to claw her way upward to the status of thief, as life at the bottom is even shorter and nastier than general life is in this city poised between two ancient civilizations. The Scorpion is a very, very enigmatic and powerful person who Darya really does not want to cross, but if she wants to survive, she is going to have to try to outwit . . .
And so we are introduced to a wildly colorful cast of characters as new dangers threaten Darya waking and sleeping.
If the reader wants one of those one-sentence tag lines, I'd say "If you like Leigh Bardugo's tales, you really should give this novel a try." But for me, the real fun of this breakneck paced story was discovering, along with Darya, the palimpsest of the jiang hu world--the world of the chivalric martial artist--overlying the real world of the Silk Road, bringing with it mysteries and even hints of magic.
Absolutely the only complaint I have (and it's really more of an observation) is that the author plumped for the Wade-Giles system of transliteration over Pinyn, but that was an informed choice, with reasons given at the end of the novel. I happen to find Pinyin easier.
That aside, I relished this novel from beginning to end, and I really hope that there will be more adventures with Darya and her friends.
Loading...
