ROSEMARY MAC CABE

There’s something about literature set in India that repels me – it may have been White Tiger what broke the camel’s back – and something else that attracts me in equal measure to Chinese literature. Maybe it’s because I quite enjoyed Memoirs of a Geisha, it being the closest my young and put-upon self would get to high literary smut, and before Christmas I read The Good Women of China, which I would recommend to anyone as a way of understanding the position of women in many patriarchal societies, albeit in an exaggerated form of post-revolution China.

I still don’t quite understand Chinese politics, although I doubt there are many who do, without having spent years studying it. Hong Ying’s story is not a political one but, like many Chinese memoirs, it is littered with political history and cultural norms that tie in closely with the regime of  the time. From famine to revolution, from Chongqing to Tiananmen Square, Ying’s autobiography is as political, as geographical as it is personal – and it is personal.

Hers is a story of love or lack thereof, of not fitting into a family, a society, where fitting in was essential – of growing up in an atmosphere of secrecy and staunch privacy, at the expense of self expression and understanding. It is also an illuminating story about identity, about realising and holding onto a sense of self when you can’t even know your own past, or your own history. It is a heartbreaking story of growing up with neither love nor affection, but only an inexplicable fear of abandonment and of discovering a history more terrifying than a loveless family.

The story itself is fragmented, but it becomes the norm and, in fact, more natural than a chronological recollection – memory itself is fragmented, and our lives don’t flash in front of our eyes in order, from birth to death. Rather, they come in fits and starts, one thing reminding us of another, and Ying does an excellent job of maintaining order in a chaotic series of memories.

Related posts:

1. 2010, book three: La Candy
2. 2010, book two: The Road
3. 2010, book one: Shutter Island