The Vagrants has got to be one of the grimmest novels I’ve read this year, and yet it is a book I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. The author grew up in Beijing of the late 1970s, the tumultuous post-Mao period in a China which had emerged from the horrific Cultural Revolution without plans to replace it with anything positive. The population was splintered between those whose humanity had been virtually destroyed by the bludgeon of Maoist doctrine, those who were struggling to enter the modern […]
Tan’s story of courtesan life in China not quite up to The Joy Luck Club
Another examination of complex mother-daughter relationships, this one set against the backdrop of 1912 Shanghai, then moving to the U.S. west coast and back again to China across a span of 40 years. The primary narrator is Violet, a little girl living in Shanghai with her savvy American mother turned madam of a highly specialized courtesan house which caters to Chinese and American businessmen and politicians, and successfully mixes business deals with sex. Violet is proud of her American heritage, until she discovers one day […]
An immigrant family beset with secrets
A sensitively written portrayal of a Chinese American family with many secrets and a serious failure to communicate. Ling Tang has been widowed for nearly a year, but can’t get past the pain of a brittle marriage and two adult children who can’t communicate with her, each other, or their significant others. The story is told from the varying perspectives of Ling and her children Emily and Michael, and the rawness of their damaged lives is tangible and sometimes hard to take, but she offers […]
A Story About Chinese Americans (No Concubines!)
The Year She Left Us is a first-rate novel from a first-time novelist. Using the western adoption of Chinese girls as a plot device, it examines issues of abandonment, adoption and assimilation; the relationships among mothers, daughters, and sisters; and, like Mary Karr’s memoir, the impact of “lies of omission” on a family. The Year She Left Us is the story of Ari, her mother Charlie, her aunt Les and her Gran — the Kong women. Gran was born and raised in China, coming to […]
Pretty much everything I know about the Boxer Rebellion, I learned from these books
In Boxers, we see the origins of the Chinese Boxer rebellion through the eyes of Bao, who becomes one of its leaders. Bao grows up in rural China at the end of the 19th Century. He lives for the spring every year when travelling troups perform operas, full of drama, excitement and ancient stories of heroes and gods. The stories stay with him throughout the rest of the year when he performs his chores and is teased by his older brothers. His life changes irrevocably the day one […]
A trip down the Yangtze …. with a corpse!
The final volume of the “Red Princess” trilogy, Dragon Bones had me captured from the get-go. The author introduces us to the mighty Yangtze River in China by portraying the voyage of a corpse as it is swept, crashing and smashing and sometimes floating its way through the Three Gorges and the massive dam of that name still under construction, until fetching up on the outskirts of a city, setting the stage for an investigation by our intrepid couple Detective Liu Hulan and her […]
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