I should have been due to pick a good book, since I haven't picked a good book in a while. But apparently it was not to be. I really just have to main problems with this book: 1. I was lost and confused for most of it, and 2. It was depressing.
1. I could not, for the life of me, keep the characters straight. Let alone keep straight who was committing incest with whom. I finally just started assuming that everyone was having sex with some relation and, honestly, it made the book easier. I understand that the author was making a point about how it was for Kae in trying to piece together the story, but I would have liked for some things just to have been said rather than trying to infer them from hints and suggestions.
2. Dysfunction, dysfunction, dysfunction!
Some passages I have marked to comment on:
Letters 1919: Her sister isn't very supportive is she? If someone wrote back to me like that I'd stop telling her about my troubles.
Mui Lan 1924: Wow, the abuse! I can't believe what she called her daughter-in-law because she wasn't pregnant! And it was her son's impotence! How did she not see this?
Choy Fuk 1925: Hmm, if you can't get your wife pregnant and you can't get your mistress pregnant, wouldn't you start to wonder if maybe it was you? Later on, he does, but only after blaming the women first.
Beatrice 1939: Can you blame her for being a little crazy?
"In each of their woman-hating world, each did what she could." This is one of the few parts I liked because Kae is so understanding that each woman tried her best to work with what she had.
Um, not recommended. Wait, it's too late for that!
When I first started reading this book I didn't care for the writing style of the author. It took me awhile to get use to it. There were so many different characters to keep track of and their having Chinese names and nicknames did not help the matter. My copy of the book has a family history chart in the front and even with that it took me half way through the book before that chart made sense.
Straightening out these characters for me is like unraveling a twisted ball of yarn, or a mess of Christmas ornament hooks all tangled together.
Now that I am past the half way mark of the book, I am beginning to enjoy it more, probably because I am more able to keep the characters straight in my head and the family chart makes more sense now.
I don't often quote statements from books, but there were a few in this one worth mentioning:
"She looked around for women to tell her what was happening, but there were none. By herself, she lacked the means to know what to do next. Without her society of women, Mui Lan lost substance. Over the years she became bodiless, or was it soulless" - the Chinese village where she came from had a society of women that stuck together and helped each other... the aloneness/loneliness she now had to deal with must have been very emotionally painful.
"Away in the distance, he followed the movements of what might have been a pair of hawks or eagles circling in the sky. Maybe they were just crows, but he suddenly remembered a love poem: When a pair of magpies fly together They do not envy the pair of phoenixes
A lovely way of expressing how two lovers see only their beloved when they are together and believe that no one else has loved as they have.
I had to chuckle when I read about Kae and her response to being alone for the first time with her baby. The scene was really funny. Apparently the baby had been put in his crib without a diaper on him... a crib with matching sheets, and a fine, hand stitched satin coverlet. He wakes up and when she picks him up, he starts to mess and she wraps him in the satin coverlet. It has been many moons since I held my first baby and I am sure I did some inexperienced things, but this was not one of them (that I can remember). But I sure can relate to the sentiment expressed in this episode. Here is this highly successful business-woman now faced with a totally different world and she is out of her realm. So she does the most sensible thing she can do, she calls her mother - who comes and puts the situation back into order. Ah - mothers. Of course the mother has the nanny with her who really knows how to help calm the situation. Anyways, I thought this scene was funny. It was easy to imagine.
Now that I am halfway through the story, it has definitely gotten me involved, so Melissa, your pick is not hopeless.
I finished the book. Not such a bad book to read, Melissa.
At the end the author gives us more insight into Wong Gwei Chang's life and relationships.
The scene where his old friend Lee Chong visits him after holding a grudge for so many years and the two of them set aside their differences and re-establish their friendship is very touching.
When he finally tells Ting An that he is his son and it takes a bit for the truth to sink in, the emotional pain of the scene is very sad. If he had told him from the very beginning, how different would Ting An have lived his life. Although he probably would still have resented his father for abandoning his mother the way that he did.
I found it difficult to follow the author's psychological comments. I suppose you college grads didn't have that problem. Anyways I prefer straight out comments rather than college level statements - but that is me.
My copy had a family tree at the front and I referred to this OFTEN. That helped me immensely.
Overall, I liked the book. It was an interesting cultural perspective – so much emphasis on babies and BOY babies!
And why doesn’t anybody figure out that the problem with producing babies is Choy Fuk? Especially HIM!
Of note: Chapter 3: Choy Fuk 1925 “She infuriated him with her sagging milk bags and mangled belly button” shortly followed by “Sperm was liquefied brain matter”. So true!
Chapter 3: Ting An 1925 I found it intriguing that the Chinese symbol for good is a boy and girl together.
Chapter 4: KAE 1986 After having a baby, KAE is instructed to drink beer and not wash for a month after giving birth. YUCK!
In this same chapter, reference to a “big-boned gal”. A and I particularly like a kd lang song entitled “Big Boned Gal from Southern Alberta”. So here is yet another big-boned gal from Canada.
Chapter 6: Feeding the Dead Fong Mei sums up the whole story quite nicely I think “I was good at childbirth…. I would have had hundreds of pretty grandchildren. I wouldn’t have died of loneliness” and “Women, whose beauty and truth were bartered away, could only be mirrored, hand-held by husbands and men, they don’t even like to think that they can claim their children to be totally their own…. I had to corrupt the one chance at true love I ever had”.
Chapter 6 – When Kae runs off to China to be with Hermia, I am assuming they are lovers? I don’t think there was one reference to Kae’s husband in the entire book.
The Epilogue – I don’t get it, why is it needed? Is this just to tie up some loose ends with the men in the story. What’s the whole deal with the Janet Smith murder? I thought at the beginning this was going to be a murder story but then …. It wasn’t.
I too chuckled at Kae's first time left alone with the baby. The Chinese do not use diapers, just put the baby on the toilet after feeding. Or carry a "blanket" for when the need arises. My friend, Jingda, told me that the Chinese always speak of how quickly they potty train their children (at like 4 months) when in fact it is the parents who are trained to get up and put the baby on the potty.
Oh M, I'm sorry but I did not enjoy this book. I ended up making a photograph of the family tree so I could reference it while reading but it still didn't help that much with keeping everyone straight. The constant time and character POV changes drove me a little nuts. I thought the dialogue, especially towards the end, felt unnatural. And what WAS the deal with the subplot about the murder?
The epilogue surprised me - it didn't wrap anything up.
Vocab: Medusoid - a jellyfish
Here are some favorite lines: Choy Fuk 1925: "It was too bad that she could no longer be the recipient of his precious manly juices, but that was just the way things had turned out."
Beatrice 1939: " 'I was there when her mother first tore her heart in half,' Chi once said protectively, of Bea, to me. 'And I was there when Sue took the other half.' "
J - I assumed that Kae and Hermia are lovers, or at least were at some point in their past.
B - I marked the two magpie couplet as well, it was a lovely passage.
6 comments:
I should have been due to pick a good book, since I haven't picked a good book in a while. But apparently it was not to be. I really just have to main problems with this book: 1. I was lost and confused for most of it, and 2. It was depressing.
1. I could not, for the life of me, keep the characters straight. Let alone keep straight who was committing incest with whom. I finally just started assuming that everyone was having sex with some relation and, honestly, it made the book easier. I understand that the author was making a point about how it was for Kae in trying to piece together the story, but I would have liked for some things just to have been said rather than trying to infer them from hints and suggestions.
2. Dysfunction, dysfunction, dysfunction!
Some passages I have marked to comment on:
Letters 1919: Her sister isn't very supportive is she? If someone wrote back to me like that I'd stop telling her about my troubles.
Mui Lan 1924: Wow, the abuse! I can't believe what she called her daughter-in-law because she wasn't pregnant! And it was her son's impotence! How did she not see this?
Choy Fuk 1925: Hmm, if you can't get your wife pregnant and you can't get your mistress pregnant, wouldn't you start to wonder if maybe it was you? Later on, he does, but only after blaming the women first.
Beatrice 1939: Can you blame her for being a little crazy?
"In each of their woman-hating world, each did what she could." This is one of the few parts I liked because Kae is so understanding that each woman tried her best to work with what she had.
Um, not recommended. Wait, it's too late for that!
When I first started reading this book I didn't care for the writing style of the author. It took me awhile to get use to it.
There were so many different characters to keep track of and their having Chinese names and nicknames did not help the matter. My copy of the book has a family history chart in the front and even with that it took me half way through the book before that chart made sense.
Straightening out these characters for me is like unraveling a twisted ball of yarn, or a mess of Christmas ornament hooks all tangled together.
Now that I am past the half way mark of the book, I am beginning to enjoy it more, probably because I am more able to keep the characters straight in my head and the family chart makes more sense now.
I don't often quote statements from books, but there were a few in this one worth mentioning:
"She looked around for women to tell her what was happening, but there were none. By herself, she lacked the means to know what to do next. Without her society of women, Mui Lan lost substance. Over the years she became bodiless, or was it soulless" - the Chinese village where she came from had a society of women that stuck together and helped each other... the aloneness/loneliness she now had to deal with must have been very emotionally painful.
"Away in the distance, he followed the movements of what might have been a pair of hawks or eagles circling in the sky. Maybe they were just crows, but he suddenly remembered a love poem:
When a pair of magpies fly together
They do not envy the pair of phoenixes
A lovely way of expressing how two lovers see only their beloved when they are together and believe that no one else has loved as they have.
I had to chuckle when I read about Kae and her response to being alone for the first time with her baby. The scene was really funny. Apparently the baby had been put in his crib without a diaper on him... a crib with matching sheets, and a fine, hand stitched satin coverlet. He wakes up and when she picks him up, he starts to mess and she wraps him in the satin coverlet. It has been many moons since I held my first baby and I am sure I did some inexperienced things, but this was not one of them (that I can remember). But I sure can relate to the sentiment expressed in this episode. Here is this highly successful business-woman now faced with a totally different world and she is out of her realm. So she does the most sensible thing she can do, she calls her mother - who comes and puts the situation back into order. Ah - mothers. Of course the mother has the nanny with her who really knows how to help calm the situation. Anyways, I thought this scene was funny. It was easy to imagine.
Now that I am halfway through the story, it has definitely gotten me involved, so Melissa, your pick is not hopeless.
I finished the book. Not such a bad book to read, Melissa.
At the end the author gives us more insight into Wong Gwei Chang's life and relationships.
The scene where his old friend Lee Chong visits him after holding a grudge for so many years and the two of them set aside their differences and re-establish their friendship is very touching.
When he finally tells Ting An that he is his son and it takes a bit for the truth to sink in, the emotional pain of the scene is very sad. If he had told him from the very beginning, how different would Ting An have lived his life. Although he probably would still have resented his father for abandoning his mother the way that he did.
I found it difficult to follow the author's psychological comments. I suppose you college grads didn't have that problem. Anyways I prefer straight out comments rather than college level statements - but that is me.
I am ready for the next pick.
My copy had a family tree at the front and I referred to this OFTEN. That helped me immensely.
Overall, I liked the book. It was an interesting cultural perspective – so much emphasis on babies and BOY babies!
And why doesn’t anybody figure out that the problem with producing babies is Choy Fuk? Especially HIM!
Of note:
Chapter 3: Choy Fuk 1925 “She infuriated him with her sagging milk bags and mangled belly button” shortly followed by “Sperm was liquefied brain matter”. So true!
Chapter 3: Ting An 1925 I found it intriguing that the Chinese symbol for good is a boy and girl together.
Chapter 4: KAE 1986 After having a baby, KAE is instructed to drink beer and not wash for a month after giving birth. YUCK!
In this same chapter, reference to a “big-boned gal”. A and I particularly like a kd lang song entitled “Big Boned Gal from Southern Alberta”. So here is yet another big-boned gal from Canada.
Chapter 6: Feeding the Dead Fong Mei sums up the whole story quite nicely I think “I was good at childbirth…. I would have had hundreds of pretty grandchildren. I wouldn’t have died of loneliness” and “Women, whose beauty and truth were bartered away, could only be mirrored, hand-held by husbands and men, they don’t even like to think that they can claim their children to be totally their own…. I had to corrupt the one chance at true love I ever had”.
Chapter 6 – When Kae runs off to China to be with Hermia, I am assuming they are lovers? I don’t think there was one reference to Kae’s husband in the entire book.
The Epilogue – I don’t get it, why is it needed? Is this just to tie up some loose ends with the men in the story. What’s the whole deal with the Janet Smith murder? I thought at the beginning this was going to be a murder story but then …. It wasn’t.
I too chuckled at Kae's first time left alone with the baby. The Chinese do not use diapers, just put the baby on the toilet after feeding. Or carry a "blanket" for when the need arises. My friend, Jingda, told me that the Chinese always speak of how quickly they potty train their children (at like 4 months) when in fact it is the parents who are trained to get up and put the baby on the potty.
Oh M, I'm sorry but I did not enjoy this book. I ended up making a photograph of the family tree so I could reference it while reading but it still didn't help that much with keeping everyone straight. The constant time and character POV changes drove me a little nuts. I thought the dialogue, especially towards the end, felt unnatural. And what WAS the deal with the subplot about the murder?
The epilogue surprised me - it didn't wrap anything up.
Vocab:
Medusoid - a jellyfish
Here are some favorite lines:
Choy Fuk 1925:
"It was too bad that she could no longer be the recipient of his precious manly juices, but that was just the way things had turned out."
Beatrice 1939:
" 'I was there when her mother first tore her heart in half,' Chi once said protectively, of Bea, to me. 'And I was there when Sue took the other half.' "
J - I assumed that Kae and Hermia are lovers, or at least were at some point in their past.
B - I marked the two magpie couplet as well, it was a lovely passage.
Post a Comment