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She encrusts herself with a "don't give a s---" attitude that distances her at first from our sympathies. But as her story unfolds, her poetic soul thoroughly captivates even the most jaded.
When she and Roy, an American journalist, meet and begin their long relationship, they learn from each other in surprising and profound ways, always alive through Wang's exquisite use of language.
To say this is to heap praise on Annie Wang, who has written more than 1,000 pieces in China from the age of 14. This is her first novel in English. Her poetic sensibility makes her prose redolent with pure beauty. She has a genius for simile and metaphor.
For example, Lili decides to play music for money at a hotel for rich patrons. Her parents, both serious musicians who have been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, could hardly be more shocked if she prostituted herself. But she dusts off her erhu, a Chinese violin, and plucks a sound. "The sound is the cry of an ancient concubine, abandoned by her king for ages. I am the king who has dumped my erhu concubine. But she has waited patiently for my return."
The notes of her erhu when she visits Mongolia "penetrate the open air, flying boundless, like nightingales." A memory departs "like a whiff of fading fragrance." A couple strolls "hand in hand, like a pair of lost schoolchildren."
Her prose evokes a rich Chinese mode of seeing, but Lili is no passive stereotype. She is cynical, gutsy and very real. Her doubts about herself and about the world slowly dissolve as she reluctantly comes to love Roy. She struggles with his preconceptions of China, his western linear and dualistic thinking, his idealism and what she calls his naivete.
She also struggles with his language. Once when he is away from their Forbidden Nest apartment, she pulls one of his books, "The Birth of Tragedy," off the shelf, and tries to read it with an English-Chinese dictionary. "I can't tell whether the title means that giving birth is tragic or that a tragedy is being born."
She claims not to know what the word "love" means. She also claims not to know what the word "democracy" means, or what it means to be caught up in "something larger than yourself."
But as the inexorable outcome of Tiananmen Square juggernauts on, she spends every day at the Square, participating in the events that Roy documents.
She takes notes like a journalist herself and serves as a nurse until she is exhausted. She makes us feel that we are right there with her, experiencing the heady excitement of the students' protest and the agony of the sudden, real bullets used against them.
By the end of the novel, we readers have come to know hooligans, Chinese peasants, artists, a mysterious Buddhist grandmother, frustrated parents, Communist Chinese officials and many more. All appear with such vividness and clarity that we are surprised to realize we are reading fiction.
This novel not only provides a valuable lesson in history and culture, it filters everything through the words of a tough young woman character of surprising depth, power and poetry. What a way to learn!
CONNIE SMITH is a senior lecturer of English at Mary Washington College.