My life in books

In Aliette de Bodard’s novel, In the Vanishers’ Palace, a young girl is forced by the elders if her village to offer herself to a feared dragon, in return for the dragon’s gift of healing to the daughter of the village leader. Fearful of the worst, Yên finds that the dragon, Vu Côn, wants her as a tutor to her two adopted children, Dan Thông and Dan Liên.

Vu Côn lives in a vast palace, built by a long-gone race called the Vanishers. In Yên and Vu Côn’s world, the Vanishers once ruled the world, humans and spirits such as dragons alike, with a science so advanced that it seemed the highest of magic. But the Vanishers went elsewhere in great ships, and behind them they left chaos - destructive diseases, dangerous artefacts, a world broken and need of healing. Vu Côn, in her own way, is committed to understanding the lost science of the Vanishers, focusing primarily on the horrific genetic diseases they created and unleashed, and trying to undo at least some of the damage they caused.

In a tale that owes something of its origins the the old tale of Beauty and the Beast, there is a strong but unacknowledged attraction between Yên and Vu Côn, but the latter is all too aware of the imbalance of power and shies away from Yên, indeed from all unnecessary contact with her, while Yên is conflicted by her awe and fear of the dragon, and her desire. Yên, meanwhile, learns to work with the children, and navigate the treacherous Vanishers’ palace. But great changes are waiting for all of them.

Peasprout Chen and her younger brother Cricket live in the land of Shin, where wu liu, the beautiful and deadly art of martial skating, was invented. Peasprout, who is fourteen and a prodigy at wu liu, and as such, she and Cricket have been selected by the Dowager Empress herself to study at the Pearl Famous Academy of Skate and Sword in a goodwill exchange - a mission that carries much responsibility, for the independant city-state of Pearl has taken preeminence in the great martial art and Peasprout is here in Pearl not just to learn all the secrets of wu liu but to do better than all the Pearlian students and restore the honour of Shin.

This is the premise behind Henry Lien’s delightful Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword, a fantasy for children with the spirit of anime and the feel of one of those classic children’s books that grows organically from a special story invented to tell a beloved child to a tale that enchants children everywhere. It’s set up as a traditional boarding school novel, with the protagonist as outsider forced into competition with the school bully and persecuted by the bully’s clique, with stern teachers who never understand the difficulties facing the protagonist, and unexpected allies.

Yet underneath this surface lie some dark secrets that could spell serious danger for Peasprout and Cricket, who are both innocent of the political machinations that lie behind this ‘goodwill exchange’ but may nonetheless suffer the consequences of intrigues they had no part in.

I’m really looking forward to reading the sequel, Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions, because she’s a character that it’s hard not to love, and I know I want to see more of her.

Judy Fong Bates describes her book, The Year of Finding Memory: A Memoir as a work of “creative non-fiction.” It is a story, but not necessarily “the” story, of her family’s journey from Kaiping County, in Guangdong Province, southern China, to Canada, their lives in Canada, and the family and homes they left behind in coming to Gam Sum, North America, the Golden Mountain.

Fong Bates’s family is a complex one, with a complicated story of crossing borders - these days, we’d call it a melded family. Her father Fong Wah Yent had married in China, but came to Canada originally as a single man with his brother, leaving his wife and children behind. Though he travelled back to China several times, due to the passage of racist immigration laws, it would be years before he would be legally able to bring any of his family - which had grown to include three sons Hing, Shing, and Doon, and a daughter Jook - to Canada. But before that time, his first wife would die, and he would return to China and remarry, a widow with a daughter of her own, Ming Nee. But his plans to spend the remainder of his life in China ended with the Communist revolution, and in 1949 he returned to Canada, where he was finally able to sponsor his new wife Fong Yet Lan and unmarried children under the age of 21 - Hing and Jook remained in China, Shing, Doon, Ming Nee, and his youngest child - the author, Judy Fong Bates - by his new wife, were allowed to enter the country.

The occasions which prompted Fong Bates to write this memoir were two journeys to China, the first undertaken by the Canadian siblings, Shing, Doon, and Fong Bates herself, accompanied by their spouses, to China, to reconnect with the surviving members of their divided family still living there, the second by Fong Bates and her husband. In the first part to this memoir, Fong Bates intersperses her account of her experience returning after decades to a birthplace she left as a very small child, with her memories and reconstructed stories of her family’s life in Canada. The second part continues to tell her memories of visiting China with her siblings, and of her own childhood in Canada and her parents lives in both countries, but begins to weave into the narrative web elements of her current life as a middle-aged Chinese-Canadian author living in a small town in Ontario with her white husband. Two strands become three, then four as she writes about her second return to China in part three of the book.

Much of the book echoes with the vast differences between Fong Bates’ memories of her parents, and the stories about then that she discovers on her journeys to China. Her memories are of sad, defeated, often bitter, people, unhappy in their marriage, worn down from years of working in their laundry to clean the clothing of people who offered them no respect or understanding. Missing their homeland, their plans for a comfortable life together in China destroyed by the Communist revolution. Cut off from relatives, friends, culture, in a foreign land, sacrificing and denying themselves even the smallest comforts to send money home to numerous relatives struggling to survive under Communist rule. The stories she hears are of a respected, well educated woman, the best school teacher her father’s village had ever known, and a well-loved Gold Mountain visitor, generous, learned, who cared for each other, but were thwarted in their love by her father’s first wife, who refused to allow him to take a second wife into the home.

“The story of my family is filled with ghosts, their presence resonating from beyond the grave. In the course of a year, their whispers have turned my doubt and arrogance into a richer sort of knowing, and I have watched my parents grow into fully fleshed human beings. At the same time they have also turned into strangers. The more I find out about them, the further they are removed from the people who eked out a living in a small-town hand laundry. I cannot connect this charming, much-admired and respected woman to my sharp-tongued mother, consumed by bitterness. I cannot connect this confident man with high standing in his community to the diminished man whom I knew as my father, to the man who ended his life at the end of a rope. My parents were unhappy exiles in the Gold Mountain, shadows of their former selves. I am left aching to know the man and the woman who knew each other before I was born. Whatever truth I now hold feels insignificant and false.”

The Year of Finding Memory is at once an exploration of the universal nature of family histories, with their tensions, secrets, losses, fragmented stories, enduring connections and bitter disappointments, and the particular experiences of Chinese immigrants in North America, a place that seemed so alluring that its name in China meant the Golden Mountain, but which was for so many a daily struggle to survive in the midst of cultural shock and racism that ranged from the thoughtlessly callous to the brutally violent. It tells of families torn apart by ruthless immigration policies, messages of deception concealing from those left behind the difficulties of live in a new country that valued neither the people who came to its shores nor the back-breaking labour they undertook. Of obligations to send money home to those suffering under first the invasion of Imperial Japanese forces and then the Communist regime and the Cultural Revolution, when those who were safe from these horrors, at least, had barely enough to live on themselves. And it tells of the healing and becoming whole that comes of finding unknown family, piecing together the fragments of past lives only partially known and understood.

Fong Bates’s memoir of her families is rich in profound emotional truths but never sentimental or overwrought. She gives us all the facets, fragments, from her own memories and the shared remembrances of others, slowly building pictures of her parents’ lives that hint at the unrealised possibilities taken from them by the forces of history. We watch as the lives of her siblings, cousins, and the extended web of family and neighbours her parents had known in China become as real to her as her own memories, and her own life in a country that is hers as it was never her parents’.

It’s a powerful book, a vital living story, rich and rewarding on many levels.

Anchee Min:
Empress Orchid
The Last Empress

OK, I was pretty much a pre-sold audience for these books, because I have long been fascinated by the woman known as Dowager Empress Tsu Hsi (Cixi in pinyan), who fought as hard as she could to hold together the disintegrating Manchu dynasty, and China itself, against the superior firepower and technology of European imperialism.

She has been demonised, reviled, exoticised, eroticised, but rarely depicted (at least until recently – see Sterling Seagrave’s recent biography Dragon Lady), either in fiction or biography, as a woman trying to use her position as wife and later mother of successive incompetent Emperors in order to preserve her country and way of life from unending assaults both military and economic from the imperialist West, hampered by the rigid bonds of tradition and ingrained sexism within her own court.

At least, that’s how I’ve long envisioned her.

Anchee Min has written a two-volume fictionalised account of Cixi’s life, her rise from the daughter of a minor official to the most powerful woman in China – which, thanks to the intensely ritualised protocols and traditions of the court and Imperial family, still leaves her without much direct power, forced to work through various powerful men of the court in social conditions that make it difficult for her to forge a working relationship with her rival, the other Dowager Empress Tsu An (Ci'an in pinyan).

I enjoyed Min’s portrayal of Tsu Hsi, although I did have one significant issue with the book – its first person POV and the tone resulting from it. I found myself wondering at a number of points in the books who Cixi is telling her story to. My best guess, based on terminology and occasional explanations or justifications, is that she is talking to a Western audience. Having spent so much of her life trying to encourage reform in China based on some of the higher principles of Western theories of government, while watching western nations annex vast swaths of China’s territory and cripple its economy with vindictively huge demands for reparations, I couldn’t figure out why Min represented her as being so anxious to explain herself to the West. A less specific tone, or a sense that her audience is her own people, would have read better, in my opinion.

Also, I'd like to apply a rather large clue-by-four to an appropriate portion of the publishers' anatomy, who did everything they could in presenting and promoting the novels to re-exoticise and re-eroticise the story of a powerful Asian woman.