Destination: China

Book: A Hundred Flowers by Gail Tsukiyama, NEW August 2012 (Audio Book by Macmillan Audio, also published in print by St. Martin’s Press.)

In 1956, Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung)  invited the people of China to speak up. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of though contend,” he said. It took a year until the people felt confident that he meant it. However when Mao did not like the negative reactions he heard, he abruptly shut down dissent in what became known as the Cultural Revolution. Anyone who bore the signs of being educated was suspect. Even if you just wore glasses you would be in danger.  In A Hundred Flowers, Gail Tsukiyama explores how the Cultural Revolution and the communist government affected one family during five months in 1958. The family she introduces us to:

• Wei, the old man who was once a professor, and believes the communist rule is damaging China.
• Sheng, Wei’s son, who is also an intellectual and dissident.
• Kai Ming, Sheng’s wife, who treats people as a herbalist.
• Tao, the young son who is trying to make sense of life and the family members.
• An older aunt who lives with the family.
• A teenage pregnant street waif.

Hovering over all the family–the Chinese Communist government and Mao himself.  The novel features more character development than plot. It proceeds gently, framed within information about traditional Chinese culture contrasted to the rule of Mao.

While the cultural detail fascinated me, I could not help comparing A Thousand Flowers to In the Shadow of The Banyan, which gave an urgency and reality to the similar trials of ordinary people in Cambodia during the Pol Pot regime. A similarity between the two novels is the emphasis on story telling.  The old man tells stories to his grandson, and hides precious books for fear the government will find them. As in the Cambodian novel, stories help the young person grown and learn.

The thorough research of Gail Tsukiyama, part Japanese and part Chinese-American, brings China of the fifties to life. But it does not bring the emotional immediacy to this novel that Vaddey Ratner brings to her novel about Cambodia, which was based on her own life.

I reviewed this book as an audio book and I’ve heard the reader, Simon Vance, before. He has an admirable talent for intelligent interpretation and excellent differentiation of characters.  Nevertheless, this is a case where I think I would have absorbed the book more easily in print, where I could see the spelling of unfamiliar names and flip back through pages to refresh my memory of events.

Tsukiyama, who came to writing through being a poet, describes details beautifully.  I cared about the characters, but wished the insights into the effects of the Cultural Revolution were deeper rather than relatively predictable.  Tsukiyama almost seems to be soft pedaling the horrors of Mao’s campaign by giving us little information about the one person who was imprisoned, and instead focusing on the everyday life of the ones left behind.

I recently heard Liza Minnelli talk about her father Vincent Minnelli’s meeting with Louis B. Mayer of MGM about the proposed musical, Meet Me in St. Louis. Mayer asked what the movie was about, and Minnelli answered, “Nothing.” In a sense, that applies to this novel.   But ‘nothing’ is really ‘everything’ as the novel tracks the adjustments in the lives of the Chinese family during the Cultural Revolution.  As the very last line of the novel says,“There’s still a story.”

Let’s talk. Did you know about the Hundred Flowers campaign and how it led to the Cultural Revolution?

Disclaimers: MacMillan Audio provided me with a CD of this book for review, but getting review copies never guarantees a positive review, and they don’t expect it.  The links here that lead to Amazon are for your convenience should you want to buy the book. Through sleight of hand, although you pay no more, I will make a few cents for every purchase you make when you shop at Amazon through my links. I thank you! Photos come from Flickr.com and are used with a Creative Commons license. Click on each picture to learn more about the photographer.