Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

An aimless wanderer (or two) in Southwest China

Chinese-French writer Gao Xingjian won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in China in 1940, emigrated to France in 1997, and writes in the Chinese language. His novel Soul Mountain was published in 1990.

An unnamed writer of literature has gotten into trouble with the authorities in Beijing for the controversial content of his writings. He leaves the capital and takes an extended journey out west to Sichuan, sometimes venturing over the border into Tibet and other surrounding areas. He lived in this region when he was younger, so he knows much of the local history and folklore. This writer tells the people he meets that he’s looking for material for an upcoming literary work, but that really just seems like an excuse for him to do some soul searching. He gravitates towards remnants of pre-modern China—old-growth forests, isolated Daoist temples, and lonely mountaintops—and he searches for a legendary location called Lingshan (Soul Mountain). Along the way he meets a woman, also a solo traveler, and they become romantically, or at least sexually, involved. Actually, there is more than one woman over the course of the book, but there seems to be one who predominates over the others. It’s unclear what this woman is doing while he’s off visiting historical and archaeological sites. Is she just waiting in the hotel for him to return? Or, perhaps, are the chapters arranged in nonchronological order?

One of the annoying aspects of Soul Mountain is that none of the characters have names. At times, stories are related in which historical and mythical personages are named, but no one in the primary present-tense narrative has a name, just “the woman,” “the lawyer,” “my friend,” etc. Even more frustrating is the way that Gao switches the narration from first-person to second-person seemingly indiscriminately. The protagonist is known only as “I” or “you.” Later in the book there’s a “he,” and I don’t know who the hell was supposed to be the antecedent for that pronoun.

The summary above is how I read the novel, but I found out afterwards from Wikipedia that “I” and “you” are supposed to be two different characters, and Soul Mountain is actually two novels intertwined. If I have to find that out from Wikipedia, then the author hasn’t done his job very well. In chapter 72, Gao breaks the fourth wall and briefly touches upon his use of pronouns, but it’s the very definition of too little, too late. I think most people reading Soul Mountain (in its English translation, at least) would interpret the book exactly as I did.

The novel is set in the 1980s. The Cultural Revolution in China was over by then, but it is mentioned frequently by the characters as a recent memory. Soul Mountain is critical of many aspects of life under Chinese Communism—restrictions of civil liberties, unwieldy bureaucracy, degradation of the environment, censorship of literature and journalism, cruel and unusual punishment, and more. I liked Soul Mountain for what it taught me about China. It functions as an insider’s travelogue to this region of China during a certain period in history, but I could have probably gotten the same experience from a Lonely Planet guidebook or some travel memoir. I enjoyed the travel chapters much more than the chapters that chronicle the relations between the writer and his female partner(s). The sex scenes are off-putting, not because of any graphic sexual content but because of the odd and disturbing conversations they have. As a fictional narrative, there isn’t much of a novel here at all, just a collection of scenes. At first, it seems as if an actual story will be told, but as the book progresses it gets more abstract until Gao is just writing down seemingly random thoughts. I didn’t care about the characters, who never seemed to develop or progress or learn anything over time.

My Life as an Explorer by Sven Hedin

Deadly treks through Asia with a Swedish adventurer

When Sven Hedin was a young boy in Stockholm, he dreamed of being an arctic explorer. As a young man, however, his early career led him to far Eastern Europe. There he realized that he could still be an explorer, but he directed his sights eastward to Asia instead. From 1885 to 1890, Hedin made two trips into Iran and several of the “Stans” of the Near East. He then organized a series of more extensive expeditions deeper into Asia, where his journeys took him to India, China, Tibet, and Nepal. Hedin’s main goal was to fill in the “white spaces” on European maps, to chart uncharted territories. He was one of the first, if not the first, European to set foot in many of the sites he explored. In fact, Tibet didn’t want Westerners in their country, so Hedin had to sneak in. Often he and his all-Asian crew would go two months without seeing another human being, and they once went two years without seeing another European. Hedin’s explorations made him the undisputed firsthand authority on the mountainous region known as the Transhimalaya. In his autobiography My Life as an Explorer, Hedin recaps his daring, adventurous, globe-trotting life. I believe the book was written in 1924, and the first English edition came out in 1925. Despite all the amazing achievements catalogued within, this is not even a complete career memoir because Hedin continued to explore Asia for another decade after this book was published.

While engaged in his expeditions, Hedin surveyed and mapped the terrain and gathered geographic, geologic, zoologic, and ethnographic information. The problem with My Life as an Explorer, however, is that you don’t really get to learn a lot about his discoveries in the places he explored. Hedin published that sort of data in more specialized volumes, such as Scientific Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899–1902 (12 volumes). My Life as an Explorer, however, is devoted more to tales of survival and adventure aimed at general readers: nearly starving to death or dying of thirst in the desert, nearly freezing to death in the mountains, nearly drowning in rivers and lakes, nearly suffocating in sandstorms, etc. You will be amazed at the scores, nay hundreds, of horses, camels, mules, and dogs, and even about a dozen humans, who perish over the course of this book. The tenacious Hedin plows ever forward, regardless of body count. The last quarter of this memoir, in which he recounts his third expedition to Tibet (1905–1908), is the exception to this adventure-only style of narrative. There he does go deeper into what he observed of Buddhist culture in his visits to Tibetan holy sites. The first half of the narrative is a bit slow, but the book finishes on a high note.

It’s not too easy to follow along with where Hedin is at any given moment or where he’s going. Many of the place names he uses aren’t current, though a Wikipedia search can usually clear up such uncertainties. The book includes a few simplified cartoony maps, but they don’t help much. Hedin’s detailed, professional maps are printed in other books like the Scientific Findings mentioned above. In addition to the maps, this autobiography is loaded with illustrations drawn by Hedin himself. With his sketchbook, he chronicled the people, places, and memorable moments encountered along the way. He’s a pretty good artist, but his drawings don’t come across very clearly on a Kindle Paperwhite. (He also took photographs, but they’re not in this book.)

Armchair explorers will envy Hedin’s travels but not his hardships and near-death experiences. If you like to read historical explorer accounts, this is a good one, though maybe too long and arduous for casual readers. Reading this autobiography makes me want to look into Hedin’s previously published reports of each individual expedition. They’re probably less exciting than this book, but I think one would learn more about the places visited.  

Man’s Fate by André Malraux

French perspective on Chinese Communist uprising

French author André Malraux’s novel Man’s Fate was published in 1933 and won the prestigious French literary prize the Prix Goncourt. The original French title is La Condition humaine (The Human Condition), but it has been translated into English as Man’s Fate, Man’s Estate, and Storm in Shanghai, the latter title giving some indication of the book’s subject matter.

The novel revolves around a Communist uprising that took place in Shanghai in 1927, known as the Shanghai Massacre or the April 12 Purge. Several men among the book’s international cast of characters are involved in a Communist cell secretly plotting a revolt against the ruling Chinese nationalist party, known as the Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek. The conspirators hope to gain control of Shanghai before the arrival of a train loaded with Kuomintang forces and headed their way. As the novel opens, Chen, a Communist terrorist, is murdering a government official. He later sets his sights on assassinating Chiang Kai-shek himself. While there are a few scenes of violence and brutality, most of the narrative consists of back room meetings in shops, nightclubs, and opium dens, where the Communists hide, plot, and commiserate. The cast also includes a few French businessmen who represent the commercial interests that France had in China at the time. To further their business ventures, the French support Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, and Malraux is critical of this capitalist colonialism on the part of his native land.

This novel is pro-Communist and to some extent romanticizes terrorism. I don’t have a problem with that. I just don’t like the way the story is told. Malraux seems to have gone to the Joseph Conrad school of approaching everything from an oblique angle, dwelling on insignificant details at the expense of plot, and never giving the reader enough information to understand what’s going on. There is an ostentatious artiness to the prose that comes across as pretentious. It also comes across, for the most part, as more boring than this story should be. I found this period in history and the conflict depicted interesting, but Malraux writes as if he wants to obscure the details from readers who aren’t already in the know. When there are life-and-death events taking place in the story, he chooses to concentrate on the characters’ facial expressions, interior monologues, or quirky eccentricities rather than the vital matters at hand. That’s unfortunate, because there are a few chapters here that are really quite moving (in particular one involving political prisoners). I would have liked this novel better, however, if it had been written by a naturalist writer (like Emile Zola), a proletarian realist (André Stil), or even a neo-Romanticist (Boris Pasternak). In any of those cases, the reader would have gotten more social realism and less navel-gazing modernism.

Man’s Fate will probably appeal mostly to those with an interest in Communist history or leftist literature. If you don’t know much about the 1927 clash between the Communists and the Kuomintang, however, you’re not going to learn a whole lot here. Perhaps because Malraux wants to present his narrative as an insider’s view, he writes the novel as if the reader is already intimately familiar with these events. As far as the broader “human condition” is concerned, Malraux includes many scenes of characters dealing with existential angst. If you’re not in a position of killing or being killed, however, it is difficult to see how their inner turmoil and personal dilemmas are applicable to the non-revolutionary life.

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Growing Soles: A Ninety-Six Year Journey Around the World by Micae Martinet

Circling the globe on foot in 1920 and 2016

I first encountered the name Hippolyte Martinet while doing genealogical research. He is a distant cousin of mine; we share some Belgian ancestors. Whereas my Belgians settled in Wisconsin, Hippolyte’s grandfather settled in New Orleans, where he fell in love with a mulatto slave, purchased her freedom, and married her. Both of Hippolyte’s parents were free Blacks with one-quarter African ancestry, making him one-quarter Black as well. While the circumstances of Hippolyte’s birth are quite interesting, the circumstances surrounding his death are even more so.

In 1920, at the age of 41, Hippolyte Martinet decided to walk around the world, barefoot, relying on the kindness of strangers. Having previously moved to Washington State, he set out from Seattle, marched to New York, and then took a ship to England. After hiking across 16 nations in Europe and Asia, he died of malaria in Yunnan, China. Growing Soles, a book on Hippolyte’s life and travels, was published in 2020. The author, Micae Martinet, is Hippolyte’s great-grandniece. Not only has she researched the story of her great-granduncle’s epic walk, but she and her husband Doug also set out to complete Hippolyte’s journey from his burial site in China to Hong Kong, which would have been Hippolyte’s departure point back to Seattle. The chapters frequently hop back and forth between Hippolyte in the 1920s and Micae in 2015 and 2016. Growing Soles thus combines a historical biography that brings to life this unique figure from a century past with a personal memoir of the author’s own travel adventures in China.

Hippolyte is a fascinating character, but there isn’t a whole lot of information available on him—just a few articles, a few letters, a few documents, and a few photos. Micae Martinet has certainly done her due diligence in the research department and reprints what she has found in the book. She has also done a great deal of historical research into the events that were happening at the time Hippolyte passed through the places where he walked. This adds valuable context to his travels, particularly in regards to issues of race, class, and labor unrest during the 1920s.

The majority of the book, however, is about the travels of Micae and Doug as they finish the last 1,200 miles of her great-granduncle’s walk. One learns a bit about Chinese culture from Micae’s experiences, but for the most part this is a memoir composed of personal anecdotes about hiking and roughing it on the road. Recurring topics include Asian bathrooms, food and hotel accommodations, Micae’s medical problems, and run-ins with the Chinese police. At times she digresses into other trips she has taken abroad. As a curious traveler myself, I admire Micae and Doug’s adventurous journey and sometimes envied their off-the-beaten-path view of a foreign country. Often, however, the monotony of following one highway for over a thousand miles did not seem like the most enjoyable or educational way to experience an exotic land.

I read this book because I wanted to learn more about Hippolyte, so I was attracted more to the history than to the memoir. I did find much vicarious interest in Micae’s contemporary travel narrative, but I would have preferred more content on Hippolyte’s era. Still, this is likely the most comprehensive source of information on Hippolyte and his walk, and for that I greatly appreciate Micae Martinet’s efforts in researching and writing this valuable account. It is a fascinating story that deserves to be read.
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Letter from Peking by Pearl S. Buck

Misplaced delivery
Perhaps more than any other writer who’s won the Noble Prize, Pearl S. Buck is often accused of being a “romantic” novelist. That’s not meant as Romantic in the sense of Victor Hugo or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but rather as romantic in the sense of Harlequin Romance novels and the Hallmark television network. While in past reviews I’ve always defended Buck against such criticism, it is harder to make a case for her 1957 novel Letter from Peking. This is the 15th Buck novel that I’ve read, and it is one of her least successful and more melodramatic books.

Set in the early 1950s, Letter from Peking is narrated by Elizabeth MacLeod from the Vermont family farm she inherited from her parents. She is separated from her husband Gerald, who is in Peking, China. Gerald was born in China, the son of an American man and a Chinese woman. Elizabeth and Gerald met at college, when he was studying at Harvard and she at Radcliffe. After marrying against the wishes of her parents, they lived together in Peking where they had a son, Rennie. When war broke out and the communists started taking over China, Gerald, the president of a university, decided to stay in Peking to do his duty to his institution and his country. He sent Elizabeth and Rennie back to America, however, because being white Americans they would not have been safe from the communists’ hostility towards westerners. In the opening pages, Elizabeth receives a long-awaited letter from Gerald, in which he tells her that he loves her very much, but this will be the last letter she receives from him. Although neither divorced nor widowed, Elizabeth must deal with the fact that her loving marriage may be over for good.

The first half of the novel flashes back to the couple’s early courtship in an era when Americans didn’t want their daughters marrying a Chinese, and the Chinese didn’t want their sons marrying an American. Elizabeth describes how even though they shared love at first site, each had to come to terms with the other’s foreign-ness. The second half of the novel deals mostly with son Rennie having to come to terms with his own Chinese heritage, which is not looked upon favorably in America. One frustrating aspect of the novel is that although one sentence of Gerald’s letter is revealed in the first few pages, you have to wait another two-thirds of the book to find out the entire contents of the letter and the reasons behind his giving up on the marriage.

What I dislike most about Letter from Peking, however, is the narrator’s voice. Although this book is intended for adults and deals with adult issues like marriage, sex, parenthood and race, for some reason Buck chose to write the narrative in short, choppy sentences and a vocabulary suitable for a fifth grade reader. That might be appropriate for a poorly educated Chinese farmer whose second language is English, but it is certainly not appropriate for a blue-blooded Vermont woman who went to Radcliffe. One thing I like about Buck’s writing is that she doesn’t indulge in verbal gymnastics or pretentiously throw around ten-dollar words. Her prose is always clear and articulate, but I don’t recall it ever being as dumbed-down as it is here. In addition, Elizabeth McLeod just really isn’t all that likable or sympathetic. Her narration makes her sound haughty and conceited, and one pities her son for having to put up with such a domineering mother.

Letter from Peking is by no means a terrible novel, and like any of Buck’s books, you do learn a thing or two about Asian culture from a writer who lived in China for many years. This is a better novel than some of the potboilers she wrote under the pseudonym of John Sedges, like The Townsman or Death in the Castle. Compared to great novels like The Good Earth or Dragon Seed, however, this book is a disappointing soap opera.
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Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin

Labyrinthine family saga
Hong Lou Meng, or Dream of the Red Chamber, is widely regarded as the greatest novel in the history of Chinese literature. It was written during the Qing dynasty by Cao Xueqin, who completed 80 chapters before his death in 1764, although earlier copies of the work exist that date back to 1754. The book was only circulated through hand-copied manuscripts until the first printed edition appeared in 1791. This printed edition contained 120 chapters, but there is disagreement over whether the last 40 chapters were written by Cao Xueqin or by the editors of the 1791 edition, Gao E and Cheng Weiyuan. English translations of Hong Lou Meng differ widely and vary in number of chapters. Wang Chi-Chen, a professor at Columbia University, published an English translation in 1929 and a revised and expanded edition in 1958. I am reviewing this 1958 translation of Dream of the Red Chamber, in its Doubleday Anchor Book paperback form. I believe this version of Wang’s translation, consisting of 60 chapters, is an abridged version of the original narrative, but it was plenty enough novel for me.

The story revolves around an extended Chinese family of wealthy aristocrats, the Jia or Chia clan, depending on which English translation you’re reading. The family is divided into two branches, who reside in adjoining compounds. The first thing that strikes you upon delving into the novel is that you are caught in a very tangled family tree. The cast contains over 400 characters, about ten percent of whom are considered major characters. How they are all connected is incredibly difficult to follow. You can find family trees related to the novel online, but they certainly don’t include everyone, and the spellings of the names may differ from your edition. In his translation, Wang uses the outdated Wade-Giles method of romanization rather than the more current Hanyu Pinyin system. He also translates the names of many female characters into English, like Black Jade, Phoenix, Precious Virtue, and Purple Cuckoo. The male characters, however, do not get the same treatment. The Chinese often refer to people by titles of familial relationships (e.g. second sister, maternal grandmother), which makes distinguishing one character from another even more difficult. I have more than a beginning familiarity with the Chinese language, in traditional characters and pinyin, but I still found Wang’s English translation a difficult read.

Nevertheless, Cao’s art still shines through. There is no denying this is a great work of literature. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, entire professorial careers have been built on the interpretation of this one work. The most prominent plot line involves a moving love story between two young cousins, and the fortune of the family as a whole follows an epic trajectory worthy of a classical Greek tragedy. Cao’s impartial depiction of high and low social classes is admirable for the 18th century. Also, Chinese literature seems refreshingly immune from the prudishness of its Western counterpart, judging from the fair amount of frank sexual content present in this novel.

The narrative structure and form of a Chinese classical novel differs from what Western readers are accustomed to, and for that reason Dream of the Red Chamber makes for a challenging read. That difference, however, is also one of the enticements to read the novel, because in doing so, the reader discovers firsthand the beauty and power of a foreign and unfamiliar art form. Any reader with an avid interest in Chinese history and culture will find this book worth the effort. I wouldn’t enthusiastically recommend the Wang translation, but then again I haven’t experienced any other. Before investing a lot of time in the novel, I would suggest reading a few sample paragraphs from different editions to decide which version is the most comfortable.
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Peony by Pearl S. Buck

Family saga of the Jewish diaspora in China
Though Pearl S. Buck wrote historical novels about a variety of peoples and places, she is best known for her books set in China, the country in which she was raised. In the case of her 1948 book entitled Peony, however, the subtitle “A Novel of China” really doesn’t let you know what you’re in for, as this is quite an unconventional book by Buck. Here she bases her story on the history of Jews in China, particularly the centuries-old Jewish community of Kaifeng, Henan Province, where the story of Peony takes place.

Ezra ben Israel’s Jewish ancestors arrived in Kaifeng four generations prior to the start of the novel. His family has managed to maintain their Jewish identity despite the progressively shrinking membership of their synagogue. Ezra, a successful merchant, is the son of a Jewish father and Chinese mother and displays a healthy respect for Chinese customs. His wife, however, is more of a hardliner in her devotion to the Jewish faith and believes in preserving the racial purity of her community. She envisions her son David as the future rabbi of the Kaifeng synagogue and wants to marry him to Leah, the daughter of the current rabbi. Peony, a young Chinese woman, is a bondmaid in the family household and has been raised almost as a daughter to Ezra and a sister to David. She is secretly in love with David, but realizes that as a bondmaid (a nicer word for slave) she has no chance of being his wife. Instead, hoping to please him, she schemes to encourage his marriage to a wealthy Chinese girl to whom she learns he is attracted.

Because the Jews were welcomed by the Chinese and allowed to live according to their Jewish faith and customs, this is not a tale of religious persecution. The primary threats facing the Jews of Kaifeng are assimilation and attrition. The Chinese were so welcoming that cross-cultural exchange and interracial marriage became common, resulting in cultural dilution. David is faced with the dilemma of to what degree he owes allegiance to his ancestral culture (and his mother) and how free he is to follow his heart and live his own life as he sees fit. As is often the case with Buck’s books, the story sometimes ventures into soap-opera melodrama, but she is such a good transcriber of human emotion, and the characters feel so genuine, that the reader usually doesn’t care. Even when the plot of Peony becomes romantically overwrought, it is anything but formulaic. The narrative takes unexpected turns and neither succumbs to mawkishness nor settles for an easy ending.

For much of the book, the time period of the story is indeterminate. Buck goes out of her way to make the story timeless by eliminating historical detail. For example, neither horses nor automobiles are mentioned as a means of transportation, and the Jewish family acts as if they could be straight out of Ben-Hur. Towards the end of the book, however, the Empress Dowager Cixi makes an appearance, which places the story roughly in the 1890s. The ebook edition from Open Road Media includes a substantial afterword, written sometime after 1990, by Wendy R. Abraham, an expert on the Jewish diaspora in China. She gives a detailed historical overview on the subject, from the arrival of the first Jews in China as early as the 8th century to a summary of the research on the Kaifeng Jews up through the late 20th century. The nonfiction account of this surprising episode in world history is truly fascinating, and the fictional narrative that Buck crafts from it is moving and thought-provoking. Though not as outstanding as The Good Earth trilogy, Peony is one of Buck’s better books.
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The Analects by Confucius

Prior historical knowledge required

The Analects is a collection of aphorisms, anecdotes, and other snippets of instruction compiled by followers of Confucius around 2,000 years ago. There are no doubt many different versions and editions of The Analects in English translation. The one I am reviewing is the ebook edition from Open Road Media, which is likely based on the public domain file of the James Legge translation from Project Gutenberg. There is no denying the importance of Confucius in Chinese history and Eastern philosophy, but how does The Analects hold up as a reading experience for the 21st century reader? To a Westerner, like myself, even if you habitually read philosophy, it is difficult to just pick up a copy of The Analects and extract the wisdom contained within it.

In form and structure, the Western text that most closely resembles The Analects would likely be the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The Analects is divided into 20 books, which are then divided into numerous chapters, most of which are only a sentence or a paragraph long. Some chapters consist of a few brief numbered passages. Like the Meditations, there is no discernible order to these chapters; for the most part they just fall where they may. While each individual chapter can be studied for its own merits, you’d really have to develop an intimate knowledge of the book as a whole in order to understand all the connections between the various chapters and form a complete picture of Confucian thought.

Though the teachings of Confucius form the basis for the Chinese religion of Confucianism, the philosophy of Confucius is really a secular philosophy that concentrates on ethics and politics rather than any metaphysical worldview. Confucius’s teachings were intended as training for scholars wishing to enter public service and work their way up the bureaucratic ladder of government. He also, however, looks into broader issues of ethics, interpersonal relations, right living, and personal happiness that may be relevant to anyone’s daily life. Some of the advice on governing may be applicable to the political and business worlds of today, but Confucius’s emphasis on knowing one’s place in the social strata is unlikely to be embraced by ambitious Western individualists. There are some similarities between The Analects and the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius in their advocation of resigning one’s self to the reality of one’s place in life. While the Stoic attitude might be simplistically summed up as, “You may be born a slave, but no one can enslave your mind,” the Confucian view in a nutshell might be something more like, “If you’re born a servant, be the best servant you can be.”

Just as the first book of the Meditations refers to a number of ancient Roman personages that the average modern reader is unlikely to be familiar with, The Analects is peppered with references to historical figures of China’s ancient past. Such references are pervasive throughout The Analects, to the point where you’d really need a master’s degree in Chinese history to figure out much of what’s being alluded to. There are plenty of passages that clearly state a code of conduct for right living, or list the admirable qualities of a superior man, but these are interspersed between anecdotes of dukes, government functionaries, and students of the Master, some of which seem to require prior knowledge of the characters mentioned. What’s a Westerner to make of such passages without detailed explanatory annotations? There is relevant wisdom in The Analects if you’re willing to dig for it, but rather than reading the original text most readers would probably be better off consulting a textbook that explains the teachings of Confucius in an orderly and accessible manner.
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Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan

Tragicomic family saga of 20th-century China
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, published in 2006, is a historical novel by Chinese writer Mo Yan, who won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. It chronicles the lives of one Chinese family through the second half of the twentieth century, but it is far from a conventional period epic. In fact, it is likely to be one of the oddest novels you’ll ever read.

The story is told as an extended conversation between two narrators, one of whom on several occasions dies and undergoes reincarnation. Ximen Nao is a landowner in the agricultural district of Northeast Gaomi Township. He is a wealthy and respected member of the community until the Communist Revolution, when he is executed so his land can be redistributed. When the novel opens, Ximen Nao is in the underworld, being tortured by the demon minions of Lord Yama, the judge in charge of assigning reincarnations. His soul is sent back to Earth in the body of a donkey, born in the very same village where he previously resided. While a donkey, he maintains some of his human intelligence and is able to observe and interact with his descendants and former neighbors. At the same time, he also adopts the nature of a donkey, concerns himself with donkey matters, and socializes with his fellow donkeys. This cycle of reincarnation continues throughout the book, as Ximen Nao comes back successively as an ox, pig, dog, monkey, and finally as a human child who serves as one of the narrators. Admittedly, this is disorienting at first. As the novel goes on, however, Mo Yan leaves enough bread crumbs for the reader to follow the trail of what’s going on, and after a while one really appreciates this unique manner of storytelling.

As a donkey, Ximen Nao becomes the property of Lan Lian, one of his former tenant farmers, who has married Ximen Nao’s former concubine and is now raising Ximen Nao’s children. While all the farmers of Gaomi Township, under Chairman Mao’s urging, are joining the local farming cooperative, Lan Lian defiantly chooses to remain an independent farmer. As the village’s sole holdout, he (and his donkey) suffer great persecution for this decision. Though often told in a satirical manner, the novel vividly brings to life the paranoia and vindictiveness of the Cultural Revolution, when anyone accused of displaying remotely capitalist tendencies could be punished by their vigilante neighbors. The novel spans the years 1950 to 2000, so Mo Yan later gets the opportunity to apply his biting wit to China’s recent transformation towards capitalism.

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is really a fascinating look at Chinese history and a fun read loaded with dark humor. The book’s one major fault is that it is just too long. Lengthiness itself is not a fault, but there is definitely some fat that could be trimmed here. The midsection, in particular, sometimes makes overly protracted digressions into the animal lives, replete with feces and sex jokes. One must admit, however, that when Mo Yan tries to be funny, he truly is funny. It is admirable the way he effortlessly weaves lowbrow profanity into his epic literary narrative. In real life, Mo Yan grew up in Gaomi, and he playfully inserts himself as a supporting character in the book, a troublemaking problem child who grows up to be an overrated writer.

For all its laughs, however, the overall arc of the novel is ultimately tragic, as we watch members of the family and community meet with disappointment, dishonor, and death. The book contains some profoundly moving scenes of emotional power that belie its predominantly satirical bent. Together the light and the dark, the high and the low, the comedy and the tragedy, all add up to a truly memorable reading experience.
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The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea by Pearl S. Buck

Should have been a trilogy
I would consider myself a pretty big fan of Pearl S. Buck. Although I’m not crazy about every last thing she’s written, my appreciation for her work goes well beyond The Good Earth. The Living Reed, published in 1963, is the eighth of Buck’s novels that I’ve read and reviewed so far, and more than any of the others, this one really tested my patience. I’m a voracious reader, but it took me months to get through this book. It is just way too long. That in and of itself is not a fatal flaw, but length becomes an annoyance when there’s little overarching unity to the book. The novel follows the lives of one family over four generations, but it has a meandering plot that feels like several novels of different styles and messages stuck together into an ungainly montage. This family saga really could have been more effective had she divided it into a trilogy.

The story begins in 1881. Korea is governed by a monarchy, which is in the midst of a power struggle, and surrounded by neighbors—Russia, China, Japan—that wish to make it a vassal state. Il-han, a scholar of the aristocratic yangban class, is a loyal advisor to the Queen. She favors siding with China, but Il-han tries to convince her to develop a strategic relationship with the U.S. The King, however, has other plans. After much political intrigue, as history well tell you, Japan annexes Korea. From there, the novel becomes a story of life under foreign occupation, somewhat resembling Buck’s 1942 book Dragon Seed.

Buck grew up in China and had a great love for and knowledge of Chinese culture. While she doesn’t seem to have the same affinity for Korea, she has certainly done her research well. The problem is that the research often overpowers the storytelling. The first third of the book is a morass of historical context and cultural exposition. Early in the book, for example, when a major character dies, it’s unclear whether that death is necessary to the story or whether Buck just needed an opportunity for a detailed discussion of Korean funerary customs, right down to the methods by which the mourning clothes are manufactured. The second half of the book requires less heavy lifting of historical detail and concentrates more on the life of the fictional family. At times it ventures into melodrama, but every now and then you get one of those powerful emotional moments that one expects from Buck. The ending is particularly moving, but too much of what precedes it is rambling and listless.

The book concludes with the end of World War II. Much of the story focuses on Korea’s struggle for independence, and the role that America plays in realizing that dream. During World War I, Buck has the Koreans worshipping Woodrow Wilson as if he were some kind of god. While it may be true that Korea looked to America as their savior from Japan, the Korean characters’ attitude of adoration toward the U.S. often feels like wishful thinking on the part of an American author. To her credit, however, Buck makes it clear that the American government didn’t always live up to the hero Korea wanted it to be.

Like so many of Buck’s novels, The Living Reed is a monumental achievement. Her research is extensive and her narrative is epic. However, reading the book inspires more admiration than enjoyment. Compared to better books like The Good Earth trilogy and Dragon Seed, this one feels a bit empty, despite its mammoth size. Sometimes the human element can get lost in the epic.
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China Flight by Pearl S. Buck

Good old-fashioned World War II-era potboiler
China Flight, published in 1943, is a novel by Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck. It is not one of her better known works, and possibly hasn’t been reprinted since the 1950s. I sought out this book because I suspected it might be the third novel in a trilogy with Dragon Seed (1942) and The Promise (1943). I was wrong about that, however, and it turns out that China Flight is a stand-alone novel. Regardless, I enjoy Buck’s writing and am rarely disappointed by her novels, so I was happy to read this book, even though it’s not one of her more renowned works.

The story begins shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. America has declared war on Japan, and all Americans are ordered to leave Japanese-occupied Shanghai. For one reason or another, three Americans have lingered past the departure deadline: Lieutenant Daniel James of the U.S. Marines, beautiful young journalist Jenny Barchet, and feisty middle-aged missionary Mrs. Shipman. These three, previously unacquainted, are apprehended and brought before the local Japanese commander. He makes Daniel a prisoner of war, interns Jenny in her hotel, and confines Mrs. Shipman to her mission. This brief meeting cements a bond between these three captives, and as each contemplates how to escape from his or her individual predicament and flee the Japanese, each resolves not to leave the other two behind.

The villain of the story is the Japanese official, Shigo Kuyoshi, a highly educated, culturally refined dandy, who’s nevertheless a brutal sadist. He falls in love with Jenny and wants to bend her to his will. Not surprisingly, Lieutenant Dan vows to protect her virtue. Shigo is a stereotypical villain, though thankfully not a racial stereotype. Buck, having been raised in China, is as free from anti-Asian racism as any American writer of her time. Nevertheless, this was World War II, so every Japanese soldier is depicted as unequivocally evil. Unlike many of the motion pictures of this time period, however, Shigo is not portrayed as a subhuman monster, but rather as the sort of oily, psychotic bad guy that nowadays might be played by Cristoph Waltz. Another Asian character that plays an important role in the book is Leone Hatford, a half-Chinese, half-French woman, married to a British banker, who attempts to aid the three captives in their escape. She becomes just as much a protagonist as the American characters of the novel.

Right from the get-go, China Flight is an engaging thriller, but as the story proceeds Buck drifts away from the action-adventure narrative in favor of soap-opera melodrama. This is a solid World War II era potboiler, but nothing exceptional in terms of literary quality. Unlike most of Buck’s novels, you won’t learn a lot about Chinese culture from this book. This is not a frank and brutal depiction of the reality of war under Japanese occupation, like Dragon Seed, but rather a romantic tale of wartime heroism focusing mostly on the American concerns of its American heroes. Despite the deep cultural knowledge of its author, this book feels more like a product of Hollywood than of Shanghai.

If you’re an enthusiastic fan of Buck, you’ll probably like this novel well enough. It’s no The Good Earth, but it has its merits. If you’re just a casual reader of Buck’s fiction, there’s no need to go out of your way to hunt this one down.
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East Wind, West Wind by Pearl S. Buck

An unremarkable debut
East Wind, West Wind is the debut novel of Pearl S. Buck, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was published in 1930, just one year before Buck would become a literary superstar upon the publication of her second novel, The Good Earth. Though born in America, Buck was raised in China, where her parents worked as missionaries. She lived there for most of the first forty years of her life, departing in 1934. The story of East Wind, West Wind is narrated by a Chinese woman named Kwei-Lan, as told to an American woman (presumably Buck herself) whom she addresses as My Sister. The purpose of the novel is to contrast the traditional marriage customs and family life of the East (China) with those of the West (America). To that end, it is quite successful in educating Western readers about Chinese customs and values. As far as literary quality is concerned, however, it’s not quite up to the standard of Buck’s better-known works, but it does reveal some promise of great things to come in her future career.

Kwei-Lan comes from a family of relative wealth. Her mother and father are married, yet her father also supports three concubines and their children in the household. According to Chinese custom, Kwei-Lan’s parents arrange a marriage for her. She enters into this union with enthusiasm, willing to serve her husband and his family as tradition dictates. Her husband, however, has a different perspective on things. He was educated in America, where he experienced firsthand the Western way of life. He wears Western clothes, practices Western medicine, and favors Western attitudes toward relationships and family. He honors the obligation of his marriage to Kwei-Lan, but treats her more as a roommate than a wife. He refuses to let her assume the traditional subservient role towards his family and insists they get a house of their own. As a doctor educated in modern medicine, he considers the practice of foot binding barbaric, and urges Kwei-Lan to unbind her own feet. Each break with tradition is painful to Kwei-Lan, as her inability to fulfill the customary obligations of a Chinese wife makes her feel like a failure in her matrimonial duties. Her husband is alien to her, yet she resolves to win his love, even if she must adapt to his modern Western ideas.

East Wind, West Wind probably would have been a better novel if it were written in the third person. China has had some strong and powerful women in its history, but Kwei-lan isn’t one of them. Though the reader wants to root for her, Buck’s main purpose for the character is to portray her as a victim to China’s antiquated customs. The reader soon grows tired of her relentless obsequiousness and naiveté. The slightest deviation from the norm sets her off into a paroxysm of shock. “Oh, My Sister!” Buck seems to grow tired of it too, as she switches gears to a different story line in which Kwei-lan’s brother refuses to go through with his own arranged marriage and weds an American woman instead. Once again this makes for some fascinating culture clash, but the histrionics with which it is rendered becomes tedious at times.

East Wind, West Wind is an OK book, but not a great one. As in all her works, Buck’s humanity and optimism shine through, but stylistically this novel is much more melodramatic and contrived than classics like The Good Earth or Dragon Seed. It’s worth a read for diehard Buck fans, but if all of her novels were of this caliber she wouldn’t have won a Nobel Prize.
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The Promise by Pearl S. Buck

The sequel to Dragon Seed
The Promise, a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck, was originally published in 1943. It is a sequel to Buck’s 1942 novel Dragon Seed, but the publisher of the ebook edition gives no indication of this whatsoever. Only after I began reading the book did I realize, “Hey, I already know all these characters.” It’s important to note because if you haven’t already read Dragon Seed you’ll be lost in chapter one. Dragon Seed described the 1939 Japanese invasion of eastern China, as told through the eyes of Ling Tan and his family, who live in a village outside Nanking. The Promise opens in 1941. The family is still living under Japanese occupation. One son, Lao San, who goes by the name of Sheng in this novel, has left home and is battling the invaders as a freedom fighter.

The Promise referred to in the title is explained in chapter one. The people of Mei and Ying promised to come to the aid of China if they were ever attacked. Now the Chinese people are waiting and hoping that these two great nations will live up to that promise. Mei is America and Ying is England. Sheng leads a military expedition into British-occupied Burma to help the Brits repel the Japanese invasion there. While in Burma, the Chinese forces are commanded by an American, who may or may not be based on a real historical figure. As she typically does, Buck writes this historical novel with almost no specific proper nouns. For example, Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese military, and his wife are referred to simply as the Ones Above. Nevertheless, despite the deliberate obscurity, the reader does get an education into this lesser-known campaign of World War II. Told from a Chinese perspective, the story depicts the Americans and Brits as well-intentioned imperialists whose racist attitude toward their Asian subjects leads to the needless loss of human lives.

Stylistically, Buck’s writing is like a cross between the socially conscious realism of the early 20th century, like The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle, and the romantic television miniseries of the 1970s, like The Thorn Birds or Rich Man, Poor Man. Her novels are intelligent, moving, and skillfully crafted, with just a hint of sweet, sticky sap flowing beneath the surface. Still, those with a tolerance for romanticism will not only not mind this aspect of Buck’s work but will in fact come to enjoy it. This sequel is actually superior to its predecessor. Dragon Seed was marked by an uncomfortable inconsistency. The first half of the book consisted of brutally realistic depictions of war crimes, while the second half was all rosy optimism. The Promise proceeds on a much more even keel, rarely resorting to either extreme, and the book is better for it. Though it lacks the shocking, indelible scenes of atrocity that punctuate Dragon Seed, The Promise is a thoroughly engaging saga that convincingly conveys the stirring urgency of the life and death struggles of wartime. The final chapter is a bit weak, but not enough to discount the strength of the book as a whole.

Buck is best-known, of course, for her House of Earth trilogy, consisting of The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided. Could Dragon Seed and The Promise be the beginning and middle volumes of another trilogy? Though I’ve found no evidence to support this theory, given the ending of this book and the title of her next novel, China Flight, I suspect this is the case. After the experience I had reading this book, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if Ling Tan and his family show up unannounced in another of Buck’s books.
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Dragon Seed by Pearl S. Buck

Life under occupation
Of all the American writers who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pearl S. Buck probably gets the least amount of credit. You rarely see her name pop up on any “100 best” lists these days. There is a romanticism and an optimism in her books that was already falling out of fashion with critics back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Those with modernist leanings or cynical outlooks are unlikely to appreciate the unpretentious beauty of her works, but those who aren’t averse to good old-fashioned storytelling with just a hint of hopeful preachiness will find her novels quite moving. I can honestly say I’ve never read a bad book with her name on it. Nevertheless, Dragon Seed, originally published in 1942, is not her best work, and though I did enjoy it I must confess at times it left me scratching my head.

Buck is best-known for her 1931 novel The Good Earth. To those who have read that great work, the opening chapters of Dragon Seed feel like familiar territory. The protagonist of both novels is a farmer who loves his land, works hard to till the soil, and does his best to secure a promising future for his children. The similarities end there, however. Ling Tan and his family live in a rural village outside of Nanjing, a.k.a. Nanking. When the region is invaded by the Japanese, they must adjust to the horrors of life under the subjugation of a hostile enemy. As is typical of Buck’s work, she never uses the words “China” or “Japan,” and deliberately avoids historical specifics in an attempt to tell a story that is more universally human. While that’s a commendable intention, and she almost pulls it off, the lack of detail is slightly annoying. Dragon Seed is a fictional account of the 1937 event known as the Rape of Nanking. The atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers are an integral part of Buck’s narrative, in particular the indiscriminate rape and murder of Chinese women. The story, told from the perspective of the victims, is understandably one-sided, as are many literary works about World War II. The invaders are all soulless monsters —which may be justified given the historical facts—yet to Buck’s credit, the Chinese are not all saints and martyrs either. Some become collaborators; others form a resistance movement that drives them to commit brutal acts of their own. Ling Tan and his family are altered irrevocably by the tragedy and brutality of war. Buck tells the story with a gritty realism that is unsparingly frank and heartbreakingly powerful.

At about the three-quarter mark, however, a new character is introduced that is just too perfect to be true. The novel changes horses mid-stream and trods down a much more romanticized path, becoming something that calls to mind the golden age of the television miniseries. The purpose of this change of tone is for Buck to inject some hope into the proceedings, but the book’s final act is so incongruous with all that came before that the effect is truly jarring. This is not a bad book by any means, especially if you’re open to a good romantic epic, but in many ways Dragon Seed feels like two separate stories, one dark and one rosy, with a light switch turned on in between.

As always, Buck’s prose is a joy to read. She constructs sentences with a unique syntax that calls to mind the unusual word ordering of Mandarin Chinese. The result is both poetically beautiful and refreshingly forthright. She is a brilliant observer of human nature and capable of creating scenes of great emotional resonance. Though Dragon Seed may not quite measure up to The Good Earth trilogy, it never lets you forget that Buck is a fantastic writer.
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Stories from Chinese History, Volume 1 by Hsi-chien Wu, Kuo-kuang Ma, and Teh-ming Yeh

An educational and entertaining text for intermediate readers
If you want to learn how to read modern Chinese characters there’s no shortage of books to teach you. If you’re interested in learning traditional Chinese characters, however, good texts are few and far between. This is especially true at the intermediate level. Beginners have a fair number of options for instruction, and advanced students can just read actual Chinese books, but intermediate readers may find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Very few books fit successfully in the goldilocks zone between beginning and advanced, but Stories from Chinese History, Volume 1 is one instructional text that does the job and does it well.

The book contains 20 short stories set in various periods of Chinese history, ranging from ancient to modern. Each story is two to three pages long and accompanied by 20-30 vocabulary terms and about a half dozen idioms. The stories are sufficiently challenging. Above and beyond the vocabulary terms provided, intermediate readers may find themselves consulting a dictionary for two or three words per paragraph, yet for the most part one can still make out the general gist of the text without any added help. This is just what an intermediate text should be—not too easy, not too tough. For writing practice, each story is followed by 20 questions. Ten of these are terms you are asked to use in a sentence. The other ten are questions about the story’s content, which can generally be answered by drawing or paraphrasing sentences from the story itself.

I have the first edition of the book, which was published in 1978. It uses the Yale method of romanization rather than the standard pinyin romanization most readers today are familiar with. So when the vocabulary terms are presented and defined, their phonetic spellings may seem a little odd. This doesn’t really hinder your ability to benefit from reading the Chinese text, however, and students at this level probably won’t have much trouble figuring out pronunciation from an unfamiliar romanization scheme. A second edition was published in 1994, which I have not seen, but according to its description on Amazon it also uses the Yale method.

The content of these stories is both entertaining and educational. They are based on the lives of real historical personages, but there’s also a strong element of folklore to them. They’re like the Chinese equivalent of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. Each story trumpets a defining personality trait of its main character and gives a sample situation exemplifying that trait. Often the protagonists of the tales are children who would grow up to be great men. As you work to decipher the text, you’re also learning about Chinese history and culture, which makes the experience more fun and rewarding. As a bonus, the book is well illustrated with a watercolor painting for each story.

This book provided me with valuable practice in reading traditional characters, and I also enjoyed the stories themselves. I plan to move on to the second volume in this series and read another 20 more.
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Schaum’s Outline of Chinese Grammar by Claudia Ross

A good reference, but the exercises are too elementary
Before purchasing this book, I had previously used the Schaum’s Outline volumes on French and Spanish grammar, and found them very helpful and informative. In some ways Chinese grammar is easier than the European languages, because you don’t have to worry about conjugating verbs or agreement between subjects, verbs, and adjectives. On the other hand, Chinese grammar does have one very difficult aspect: word order. When compared to English, the Chinese structure their sentences in a way that resembles some of the more convoluted utterances of Yoda from the Star Wars movies. One needs an effective reference on grammar in order to accurately decipher this mysterious syntax.

The Schaum’s Outline series basically serves two functions. The first is to organize all the grammatical rules of a language into a user-friendly outline. The second is to provide a series of exercises one can work through in order to familiarize and master the rules in question. This volume on Chinese grammar admirably accomplishes the first goal but is not entirely successful at achieving the second. The main problem with the book is that the exercises are just too easy. They mostly take the form of fill in the blanks, insert this phrase into an existing sentence, or rearrange this group of words and phrases in the correct order. For the most part, they’re so easy you can do them without thinking, and if you’re not thinking, you’re not learning. To adequately understand and remember these grammatical formulae, one needs more challenging mental exercise than is offered here. One also finds quite a few cases where, after reading the sample sentences provided and doing the exercises in accordance with them, you look in the back of the book and find that the answer is different, with no explanation provided for the irregularity of that particular case.

For those studying written Chinese, you should have at least an intermediate knowledge of Chinese characters before undertaking this book. I had previously worked through the five volumes of the John DeFrancis Chinese Reader series, which gave me a familiarity with 1200 characters. While working through this book I managed to add another 125 characters to my vocabulary, and probably twice as many compounds—things like food items, body parts, articles of clothing, and some commonly used adjectives and verbs.

Schaum’s Outline of Chinese Grammar will make a good reference when reading Chinese texts. The well organized and clearly stated grammatical rules will be helpful in deciphering difficult passages. However, I don’t feel I’ve gained enough understanding of Chinese grammar to reliably and accurately compose my own complex sentences and paragraphs. For that I will have to seek out another grammar workbook with more challenging exercises. This volume is a step in the right direction, but not quite the authoritative source one expects from the Schaum’s Outline series.
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