“In a single year, my father left us twice.”
This is a multi-generational family novel, but because of the fractured nature of the family and the family history, the narrative is considerably fractured as well. Because as outsiders to the story, we have some of the official history, there’s a kind of dramatic irony involved, but especially because of the way information is restricted and controlled in authoritarian regimes. The novel begins in Canada in 1991 when our narrator is expecting a cousin to arrive to live with her and her mother. This cousin, we will find out is a kind of political refugee making her way to Canada after the protests and massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The novel also spends some in the future from 1991 where some further exploring into the family and family connections happen.
There’s a moment early in the novel when the narrator’s mother is trying to understand updated Chinese language, which was changed after the revolution to reflect statist ideals. In the scene, the mother is looking at a language that she knows well and being unable to understand it in the form it’s written because of the ways in which the new values are literally embodied in it. This moment becomes a symbol for the rest of the novel of the total upheaval of life in China and the ways in which language itself changed to reflect this. This also occurs in reference to math, to music, to literature, and of course thought and politics. The various stories that comprise the novel follow different the family members as they attempt to survive the cultural revolution in whatever ways they can. Like other recent novels dealing with authoritarianism, there’s a lot of space given over to not only try to explain the experience of living in such a state, but also the ways in which these experiences themselves fold back over themselves and resist sense. For example, a shifting set of rules that not only constantly change, but are applied backward after passing, but also are applied selectively, so that someone earnestly trying to keep up and follow those changes cannot readily do so, and the effect of this is actually the total erasure of rules or order. As one character suggests, it doesn’t actually matter if you follow the rules or not, if they want to get you, they will, and once it’s already been decided, it’s already over for you, no matter how much more life you have to live. This is true too in novels like Kafka’s The Trial and Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, both of which exist in fictional authoritarian states, or in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.
The novel also looks for parallels in the real world (and like plenty of other novels in recent years) and turns to figures like the Soviet composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev, who both looked for ways to insert actual art into their forced agitprop, and found small spaces for it, but also paid the price.
The novel is a rich exploration of life inside and outside of authoritarianism, and a real reminder of actually existing dystopia.