Posts from the “China” Category

On My Shelf: Enigmas

Posted on February 20, 2012

Lately I’ve been captivated by enigmas, which might be why I’ve chosen three books for this month’s picks that promise to shed light on three very different mysteries: the collapse of a civilization, life behind China’s wall, and mystery meat on lunch plates.

THE STATUES THAT WALKED. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo. Free Press. 237 pages. $26

I was lucky to visit Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, during a recent trip to South America. The open, quiet island was mesmerizing in ways I hadn’t expected, inescapably buzzing with burning questions: What happened to all the trees? Why did they build these chicken-skin-inducing rock statues?

In Hunt and Lipo’s absorbing new book, they use architectural research begun in 2001 to solve Rapa Nui’s riddle and ultimately refute previous theories of environmental collapse. Elements of this readable narrative echo facets of Hawaii’s past, including the destructive power of rats on native forest and extended contact with Europeans in the 18^thcentury. Hunt is a UH Manoa anthropology professor.

CHINA IN TEN WORDS. Yu Hua. Translated by Allan H. Barr. Pantheon. 225 pages. $24.95

People. Leader. Reading. Writing. Lu Xun. Disparity. Revolution. Grassroots. Copycat. Bamboozle.

“This tiny lexicon gives me ten pairs of eyes with which to scan the contemporary Chinese scene from different vantage points,” says Chinese writer Hua of the framework for his new book about the culture that continues to shape modern Hawaii.

Hua wisely uses a simple narrative anchored in daily life and provides an accessible and riveting window into “the social complexities and staggering contrasts of contemporary China.”

FED UP WITH LUNCH. Sarah Wu (aka Mrs. Q). Chronicle Books. 191 pages. $22.95

Two years ago, Chicago public school speech pathologist Sarah Wu launched the anonymous blog “Fed Up with Lunch” to chronicle her experience eating school lunch every day for a year. In her new book, she takes the journey and her identity public for the first time. Think “Super Size Me” brought to nutrition and education, and a look at just a portion of America’s children who are said to consume up to half of their calories through school meals.

Wu has no specific connection to Hawaii, but community wellness and the health of our children is inextricably relevant here as we battle childhood diabetes and obesity. Photographs of each pre-packaged lunch are undeniably hypnotic, if also familiarly revolting, but it’s her earnest words and quiet revolutionary spirit that drew me in and got me pointedly thinking about school lunch’s very real implications.

-Christine Thomas

Categories: China, food, Hawaii Authors, Nonfiction

New Interview: Author Mingmei Yip

Posted on April 18, 2010

In 2008 I reviewed a peach-colored paperback original that had come across my desk by accident, which draws on the life of its author, novelist Mingmei Yip. Yip’s professional gambler father and artist mother dreamed she would become a scholar, and so Yip rose to the challenge, graduating from the Sorbonne, studying Chinese arts and the ancient qin musical instrument. After her first foray into writing—journaling during her mother’s eight-year absence while imprisoned in a Vietnamese camp—Yip became a writer, too. All of these life experiences are channeled into her engrossing debut novel “Peach Blossom Pavilion,” which brings to life the time of China’s mingji—artist-prostitutes who were geisha predecessors. {Read my review here}

Now she’s back with a new novel drawing from her life experience with Zen Buddhism. In “Petals from the Sky,” Meng Ning seeks to become an nun, even though in her thirties, but fateful circumstances lead her to question her life direction and to another path.

Though busy with her book tour, I corresponded with Ms. Yip recently about what she’s reading, and how karma has shaped her life.

Interview with novelist Mingmei Yip March-April 2010
by Christine Thomas

C.T. What are you reading these days?

M.Y. I just finished reading Chesley Sullenburger’s “Highest Duty” which I really enjoyed. I like to feel connected to people who really care what they do and do it well.

Now, I spend most of my time polishing my forthcoming third novel, “Song of the Silk Road,” a love story between a woman of twenty-nine and a younger man of twenty-one on the famously dangerous Silk Road. An adventurer, the young woman attracts danger as much as she does men—like bees to honey.

C.T. What made you pick up Highest Duty?

M.Y. I like to learn new things and things that I find interesting but don’t know much about. I find anecdotes about planes and pilots in “Highest Duty” very engaging to read, especially those related to nice and brave people.

C.T. What is it about the anecdotes that specifically grab you?

M.Y. “Highest Duty” is Captain Sully’s life journey as a pilot—his training, various anecdotes of flying, his family, and of course the famous landing on the Hudson River. I was particularly moved by an incident of a World War II pilot who, trying to save seven of his fellow pilots’ lives, ended up seventy percent burned, underwent forty odd surgeries and was left blind. But he survived well into his ripe old age. I am reassured by the spirit of bravery and self-sacrifice of ordinary people. Since I like to write about strong and brave characters, this incident particularly struck a chord in me, though it is far from my own experience.

C.T. What experience have you drawn on to create strong and brave characters in your new, second novel, PETALS FROM THE SKY?

M.Y. Buddhist nuns—I befriended these extraordinary women in my youth and know them from the inside. These women are very brave and independent. Imagine leaving home at a young age, living in the unfamiliar environment of an esoteric temple, and giving up your chance for worldly pleasures including romantic love.

My mother and grandmother are also inspirations for my strong female characters, especially my grandmother, who successfully ran the Pepsi Cola factory in Vietnam after my grandfather unexpectedly died in his early fifties.

C.T. How did you come to befriend Buddhist nuns, and where were you during this time?

M.Y. In my early twenties while living in Hong Kong, I attended a social gathering where I heard a friend talk about Buddhism using esoteric terms like samsara, nirvana, and karma. Completely fascinated, I sought to understand all these strangely beautiful phrases by plunging into the study of Zen Buddhism.

It’s karma that a friend told me about a beautiful, talented nun who was running a temple not too far from where I lived. So I began to visit her whenever I had time and we became very good friends, exchanging ideas on arts, religion, and life.

It was many years before I came to understand what Buddhist philosophy is all about. So I’m very proud that I published a book on Zen Buddhism, which became a best seller in Hong Kong.

C.T. Did you model Yi Yong, the young nun in your new novel, after your mentor, and were you ever tempted to live life in the temple, just as your character Meng Ning wants to do?

M.Y. Yes, the young nun in “Petals from the Sky” was inspired by my nun friend of many years. During our frequent meetings, we talked about religion, arts, aesthetics, monastic life and the like. She always hinted that she’d like me to join her temple and I’d been tempted, albeit very briefly, before I met my future husband at a Buddhist conference in Taiwan. The strange working of karma.

C.T. What is karma leading you to next—another adventure in life, or in writing?

M.Y. I believe karma is now leading me to bigger projects both in my writing and music.

Categories: China, fiction, Interviews

Book Review | A Good Fall, Stories by Ha Jin

Posted on December 7, 2009

Tales of escape — and cultural resurrection

Chinese immigrants unwillingly revisit the past in Ha Jin’s latest collection.

A Good Fall. Ha Jin. Pantheon. 247 pages. $24.95.

Everyone has something he wants to escape: a job, relationship, family feud or — like the characters in Ha Jin’s new short fiction collection — a country. Rather than tell stories of emigration, though, Ha Jin, who left China in 1985, depicts moments when one’s old life crashes into new routines, resurrecting all that has been lost and gained via escape.

Each story in A Good Fall siphons readers into straightforward plots about Chinese immigrants from diverse backgrounds now living in Flushing, home to New York City’s second largest Chinatown. The characters’ 180-degree turns are most often made in response to stress and heartache inextricably connected to immigrant life. All grapple with an intense set of expatriate problems. Wanping’s love blossoms for a prostitute whose debts keep her tied to the water trade. A disenfranchised, 28-year-old monk thinks life is over because he can’t pay his debts back in China. Yet delicate generational and cultural differences subtly define their unique situations, and Ha Jin unpacks the small details of their largely indistinct lives in ways that reveal their larger-than-life personal implications.

With the breaking of a condom, Ha Jin cleverly pierces the gossamer separation between China and America in the atmospheric The House Behind a Weeping Cherry, allowing China to seep back into the lives of prostitutes living in a boarding house. When a customer blames the break on “a substandard rubber made in China,” one girl finally admits to the others, with unintended humor, that she “‘feel[s] so awful to be Chinese here, because China always makes cheap products.”’

In The Bane of the Internet, email is the infiltration device, bringing the narrator’s family troubles smack into her American life. “[T]he Internet has spoiled everything — my family is able to get ahold of me whenever they like,” she rants. “They might as well live nearby.”

Other times people crash the illusion of escape. When a young husband’s mother comes to stay in the United States for six months, In the Crossfire becomes a captivating tale of reevaluation forced by the son’s seeing life through his mother’s China-centric perspective. In Shame, a young Chinese man studying abroad is surprised by the arrival of his esteemed professor Mr. Meng, sparking a wrestling match between obligation and reinvention and a love affair with New York, which Mr. Meng quips, “‘is so rich even the air smells fatty.”’

And in Temporary Love Lina and Zuming’s spouses arrive from China, sadly ending their peaceful cohabitation, what they call a “wartime marriage” even though there’s no war.

Everyone in A Good Fall struggles with past and present, and Ha Jin requires dynamic change of them all. Though his slice-of-life stories hit every plot point, and his choices as a writer aren’t always evident, these understated clashes of culture reveal careful thematic design and provide an almost 360-degree view of this select human experience: The concerns of people everywhere trying to make a better life come alive, one deceptively simple story at a time.

BY CHRISTINE THOMAS

Published 12/6/09 in the Miami Herald

Categories: Aloha, China, Culture, fiction

A Slowly Focusing Lens

Posted on June 27, 2008

The last of the Chicago five reviews, a mesmerizing tale of life by Wang Anyi.

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow
By Wang Anyi
Translated by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan
Columbia; 440 pages; $29.95

Without delving into historical and political intricacies, Wang Anyi’s novel “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” tells a story of post-World War II Shanghai by first laying out the city in laborious detail—painstakingly recording the labyrinthine longtang, or townhouse, residential neighborhoods, the pigeons, the pervasive current of gossip and seemingly every breeze of working-class life—like a camera slowly focusing its lens.

Wang’s Anyi’s exacting narration eventually settles on a central character, Wang Qiyao—an pretty but not gorgeous, unsympathetic but not distasteful woman who nonetheless inspires worship in friends and men, and earns her third place in the Miss Shanghai competition. She is deliberately positioned as a quintessential stand-in for all women: “Behind every doorway in the Shanghai longtang a Wang Qiyao is studying, embroidering, whispering secrets.”

Throughout the novel’s crucial span from 1946-1986, Wang Qiyao’s nostalgia recreates her past in every era and chapter. Friends and paramours exit swiftly and with little mention, quickly replaced by new ones; history lies in the background, evidenced only through wardrobe changes and changing food and currency availability—and thus Wang Anyi subtly yet pointedly reveals life’s repetitive nature.

Like Wang Qiyao, the novel is alternately appealing and tedious. It has a plot but is not plot-driven, and is a life portrait meant to stand for all lives. The hypnotic prose and melancholic story leave readers with the sense of walking slowly on a mesmerizing treadmill, as if the act of reading also makes them, alongside the characters, “part of a cycle that has been renewing itself since time immemorial.”

Categories: Aloha, China, fiction

A Peach Without Its Skin

Posted on June 23, 2008

The fourth of five of my Chicago Tribune reviews (published 6/21), a true story about post-impressionist painter Pan Yuliang brought gloriously to life in Jennifer Cody Epstein’s impressive debut novel.

The Painter from Shanghai
By Jennifer Cody Epstein
W.W. Norton; 416 pages; $24.95

What is known about the life of 20th Century Shanghai painter Pan Yuliang seems the stuff of fiction—her opium-addicted uncle sold her to a brothel at age 14; Pan Zanhua, a progressive customs official paid her debt and made her his second wife; she studied art in Paris and Rome, and became a famous Post-Impressionist painter until her controversial nudes forced her to abandon China for good.

It’s therefore unsurprising that the plot of Jennifer Cody Epstein’s debut novel about Yuliang’s life, “The Painter from Shanghai,” is utterly engrossing. But Epstein’s spotless pace, vivid characterization, and often breathtaking descriptions elevate the novel above any initial similarities with Memoirs of a Geisha to become its own distinctive canvas.

Yuliang’s strength and vulnerability, her believable growth throughout the novel into a daring, independent woman and the development of her artist’s eye are wholly absorbing, and Pan Zanhua’s support of Yuliang—even helping her unbind her feet—is charming and seductive. And Epstein’s exploration of their romance hits just the right note, tender but never maudlin, clearly painting their love just as Yuliang describes it: “a little like the need for air…You aren’t aware of it until the air is removed. And suddenly, you realize you are suffocating.”

The book’s intimacy is spellbinding, not because of the romance of the courtesan era when Yuliang “feels like a peach without its skin” but because of Epstein’s true achievement in resurrecting such a passionate woman who pursued a life of her own despite intrinsic barriers. Much like Pan Yuliang’s inspiring defiance of fate, Epstein’s assured, impeccable narrative transcends all expectation.

Categories: Aloha, China, fiction

One Enormous Mall

Posted on June 13, 2008

Part three of my China novels review (which was published in the Chicago Tribune Saturday 6.7.08), an uncomfortable look at a China mad for money.

I Love Dollars: And Other Stories of China
By Zhu Wen
Translated by Julia Lovell
Penguin; 228 pages; $14

Zhu Wen’s pithy title “I Love Dollars” belies a collection of novella and stories that are often ugly, violent, and distasteful. His skilled writing doesn’t offend, but the subject matter does, which is exactly Zhu’s intention, revealing that the exposed underbelly of China’s rampant materialism isn’t at all pleasant.

Zhu’s critique of China’s post-‘80s love of dollars is unmistakable in his title novella, featuring a heartless man fulfilling his filial duties by securing a prostitute for his visiting father, but actually assuaging his own sex “madness” and desire to spend and consume. The tale’s saving grace is the narrative irony in his obviously lost and pitiful nature.

The other stories in the collection more subtly address consumerism while drawing attention to a generation of youth lacking values; a health care system catering only to the rich; the fruitlessness of work at an “iron rice bowl,” or as a traveling universal battery salesman in “A Boat Crossing”; and men hiding from responsibility or solving life’s problems through violence.

Each showcases Zhu’s signature first-person style, embedded dialogue and relentless conversations, and illuminates relationships bereft of emotional connection. But only the spare, intriguing “Pounds, Ounces, Meat” is refreshingly provocative without being repellent, detailing a normal but bizarre afternoon when a young couple try to ascertain if the butcher has cheated them, but are confounded by translating metric into the English measurement system.

Though one may not want to inhabit Zhu’s fictional worlds for long, his argument is incontrovertible—China is sick with greed since joining the world’s “one enormous mall,” and even “a mere boiler serviceman in an electrical factory, can sense that we’re freewheeling helplessly, inexorable toward some kind of doomsday.”

Categories: Aloha, China

All Kings Build Walls

Posted on June 12, 2008

The second of five reviews of Chinese novels published in the Chicago Tribune 6.7.08, a new installment in Canongate’s myth series, which includes Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus and Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis.

Binu and The Great Wall: The Myth of Meng
By Su Tong
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
Canongate; 291 pages; $24

A new installment in Canongate’s innovative myths series, Su Tong’s “Binu and The Great Wall: The Myth of Meng” breathes fresh life into a 2000-year-old Chinese tale with a lyrical retelling evoking ancient times and effortlessly conveying universal allegories of poverty and class, power and powerlessness.

Binu’s epic journey to bring her husband winter clothes at the Great Wall construction site is rife with familiar archetypes—including hidden identities, larger-than-life traveling companions, new lands and laws (such as “Say only what you should say, and not what you shouldn’t,”) and protracted vignettes that often exist in oral stories. But most captivating is the story’s vivid, magical realist landscape, where “Even the water flowing in the moonlight gasped tensely,” men become deer and, in villages where crying has been forbidden, tears are the most powerful force around.

Binu’s tears escape through her hair, evoking memories, causing floods, and affecting everyone and everything around her, and in turn engender the book’s central question: “What was the point of crying?”

Like Salman Rushdie’s query “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” in his allegorical “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” this message, embodied in a sorrowful, headstrong protagonist unafraid to die or act outside the crowd, rises above the story’s fantastical elements and reaches across geographical walls to inspire people to fight government control and censorship as long as “’all kings want to build walls.’”

Categories: Aloha, China, fiction, Myth

Knowing What to Do and Say

Posted on June 10, 2008

I recently reviewed five novels for the Chicago Tribune (published 6.7.08), each set in China. They each gave me a provocative, often hilarious, sometimes breathtaking view into the country and its people, and I’ll share all five here this week and next.

The first is Yal Lianke’s Serve the People!. I excerpted the first lines on Literary Lotus a couple of weeks ago (peek here).

Serve the People!
By Yan Lianke
Translated by Julia Lovell
Black Cat; 217 pages; $14

When is a love story not really about love? In Yan Lianke’s cleverly amusing, almost epigrammatic novel “Serve the People!” about a Chinese People’s Liberation Army soldier ordered to become sexually involved with his division commander’s wife.

Wu Dawang is “an exceptional soldier fixated on promotion” who rises through the ranks to fulfill a promise to his wife and father-in-law and lives to the letter of Maoist ideology, serving the people and minding “what he should do and say—and what he shouldn’t.” That is, until his superiors say serving the commander and his wife is synonymous with serving the people, and Wu faces an impossible “land mine” of duty that leads to her bed.

Yan’s thoroughly entertaining, farcical plot immediately takes off like a controlled breeze, pausing in the exact places you want it to pause, and moving over events where you don’t want to linger. It’s impossible not to chuckle throughout, particularly during the scene in which Lu Lian and Wu Dawang destroy Maoist propaganda to prove each is the bigger counterrevolutionary.

Yan’s self-reflexive narratorial techniques frame the story in the context of deliberate literary device and slyly align the convoluted scenarios of communist China with an elaborate novel-like reality wrought by Mao. Hovering beneath this seamlessly executed, irreverent tongue-in-cheek depiction of how the communist lapidary “Serve the People” can be manipulated so people can serve themselves, is a cautionary tale about navigating the blurred lines between reality and fantasy that exist even in today’s post-9/11 jingoism.

Categories: Aloha, China, fiction

Posts from the “China” Category

Posted on February 20, 2012

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Posted on April 18, 2010

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Posted on December 7, 2009

Chinese immigrants unwillingly revisit the past in Ha Jin’s latest collection.

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Posted on June 27, 2008

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Posted on June 23, 2008

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Posted on June 13, 2008

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Posted on June 12, 2008

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Posted on June 10, 2008

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