December 23, 2019
In this loving, episodic memoir, Chinese novelist Lianke (The Explosion Chronicles) recalls his family’s experiences—specifically that of his father’s two brothers—during the 1960s and ’70s Cultural Revolution. After spending his teen years as a student in the Henan province, Lianke helped to support his family by joining his uncle, Siyue, working 16-hour days at a cement factory in the city of Xinxiang in 1975. He then joined the army at 20 to further help his family, during which time his father died. “It was because I wanted to join the army that he fell ill in the first place,” he writes, feeling guilt over leaving his family. He then pays homage to his father’s younger brother, Dayue, a poor but generous man who wove socks for free for his fellow villagers and gave Lianke treats he could barely afford. (“I still vividly recall the sweetness of those candies in a lifetime of endless bitterness,” Lianke writes.) Siyue, meanwhile, who left the family’s village to manage the Xinxiang factory, “shouldered the miseries of both urban life and rural life” as a “bowed-head” worker who aspired to a greater life in the city but remained stuck between social classes. Told in straightforward prose, this is a powerful family memoir of a tumultuous era of China’s recent past.
January 1, 2020
A memoir of the difficult lives of the author's family members, who eked out a bare subsistence during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Out of a sense of guilt toward his relatives, who toiled raising young families during the revolution and endured no end of hardship in their poor village, Yan (The Day the Sun Died, 2018, etc.), a winner of the Franz Kafka Prize, addresses the rarely acknowledged sacrifices they made as well as how their lives inspired him and his generation to leave their rural homes and try to find greater opportunity in the city. Yan was the youngest in a big family growing up in Henan Province, breaking up "ginger stones" alongside his beloved father to fashion the tile-roofed house that would serve as his brothers' bridal "mansions." The author barely got a middle school education. With a sick sister whose care required all of the family's earnings, there was nothing but toil and poverty, and Yan watched his father grow increasingly frail from chronic asthma. All the while, he dreamed of leaving and becoming a writer, and he followed his father's brother to work in the city at a cement factory. His experiences in the city, Yan was sure, would make for a happy life, and he set about writing after his long shifts at the factory. Eventually, the author joined the army to get away from the poverty and monotony that his relatives endured. Throughout the book, Yan depicts his provincial relatives with enormous heart and respect, acknowledging their sacrifices in a dark yet poignant meditation on grief and death. "The elderly have no choice but to take a first step on behalf of the next generation," he writes. "Then they go to the next world and lie down there, calmly waiting for their children to follow in their footsteps and be reunited with them." A memoir steeped in metaphor and ultimately tremendously moving.
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Starred review from February 15, 2020
A leading Chinese novelist, famous for sharp satire, tells the story of his family's hardscrabble life with surprising tenderness. Growing up in rural Henan Province, a central region rich in history but prone to flooding and famine, Yan (The Day the Sun Died, 2018) discovered ambivalence about his origins at a young age. His childhood was characterized by both joy and a happy sorrow, but his prevailing desire was to escape. Literature?Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber, but also Gone with the Wind?stoked his dreams, but the university remained out of reach. Eventually he joined the army, where he learned to write propaganda and taught himself to write fiction. Most of this memoir is filled with stories of Yan's father and uncles, all of whom eat bitter their whole lives. Yan admires their selflessness, and their persistence in the bleakest of times, and renders their portraits in loving detail, knowing that he is the beneficiary of their sacrifices. But Yan also admits to wanting to flee and needing to create a bigger life, even if it means dodging his filial obligations. It is this tension, together with Yan's unadorned prose, that leavens a sentimental account of peasant life into something complicated and powerful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)