Fiction thrives on conflict, drama, hardship, and calamities. Armchair travelers in time and space, we readers love to experience, vicariously, the tragedies we much prefer to avoid in real life. Caught up in emotion, we can explore threats to life and limb, moral conundrums, the push and pull of feuding families or nations at war, the great love that survives and thrives despite adversity. This is one reason dual-time novels are so hard to pull off: the demands placed on a heroine struggling to survive revolution, famine, plague, or war overshadow such complaints as faithless lovers or poor job decisions.
Eve J. Chung’s debut novel, Daughters of Shandong—the subject of my latest New Books Network interview—is not, in any sense, a dual-time novel. On the contrary, it dives into a conflict that is at once well known and under-represented in historical fiction: the Communist takeover of China. Read on to find out more.
As ever, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.
This riveting novel, the author’s first and based on the life of her grandmother, follows the fortunes of a mother and three daughters abandoned by their wealthy family in soon-to-be Communist China. It is 1948, and Chairman Mao’s forces have moved into Shandong Province, driving the Nationalist Army into retreat. Although the town of Zhucheng is small and rural, the Ang family owns a palatial estate, built by generations of government officials and scholars.
Even before the war turns against them, the family has little use for its eldest daughter-in-law, Chiang-Yue, who has produced three daughters but no sons. The family lives by the ancient Chinese proverb “Value men and belittle women,” so even though its second son does have a male heir, that child’s existence cannot redeem Chiang-Yue in her in-laws’ eyes.
So when the Communists approach, the other family members, including the girls’ father, flee. The narrator, Li-Hai, stays behind with her mother and sisters—ostensibly to keep either the People’s Army or impoverished local farmers from confiscating the Angs’ palatial home.
Of course, this doesn’t work. Soldiers take over the estate the first day. They haul Li-Hai, only thirteen, before an impromptu tribunal as a stand-in for her missing male relatives. She barely escapes with her life. Only Chiang-Yue’s history of treating the villagers kindly saves her and her daughters—first from execution, then from starvation.
Despite the family’s cruel treatment, Chiang-Yue insists that duty requires her to rejoin her husband. Thus begins their trek across China, from Zhucheng to the local hub of Qingdao, then south to Guangzhou (Hong Kong), and eventually across the strait to Taiwan. Hiding in the bushes, scrounging homeless in the streets, surviving a refugee camp—the Ang women and girls are, in their own stubborn way, relentless. And I swear, you will root for them every step of the way.
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