She couldn’t, and neither could her uncle: “In this country, rage had no place to exist except deep inside, turned against oneself.
The serious classical music student Zhuli wished her mother could get rid of memories of the terrifying Cultural Revolution camps. The most emotionally gripping scene for me had narrator’s uncle Sparrow bicycling at night through Shanghai flooded from a downpour with floating debris of dead chickens and cabbage and a little girl running, just before he stumbles on the humiliation and torture of academic Wu Bei, “He had the numbing fear that the Shanghai that existed only moments ago was gone, it had been washed away and replaced.” I felt fear of change, and of uncontrolled change. At emotional moments there’s a change in Shanghai physical indoor space: “He thought the walls were creeping nearer to him.” Dramatic movement invites us to find out what this Asian-Canadian writer is up to.Ī lot. If you allow a cultural shift, affecting metaphors a bit intentionally obscure and more apt to a Chinese ear emerge as just fine. Her piquant but formal sense of humour crosses cultures: What did the Buddhist say to the pizza-man? Make Me One With Everything. It’s a beautifully encompassing vision of Asia and the West. Thien tells the terrible story of her parents’ 20th-century China, so lucky Vancouver people can understand and be vicariously changed by it as her parents were changed. Ms Thien is a Vancouver Chinese native who, like me (child of a Czechoslovakian Jew) was born here of immigrant parents and pupated out of the school system blathering Lower-mainland colloquial English and playing hockey.
This book was hard to understand, but I loved it.
I remember friends of my parents in 1950s Vancouver referring in a friendly way to something inscrutable as “Chinese”.
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