My Life as Emperor by Su Tong

After Chinese author Su Tong won the Man Asian literary Prize for 2009 for "The Boat to Redemption" my curiosity was piqued and I vowed to get to a book of his that I had sitting on my shelf for years, "My Life as an Emperor". I bought this book in Singapore and after a hurried read of its synopsis had the idea that it was historical fiction, but it's NOT!

Su Tong has set this book (about a fictitious Chinese Emperor and his doomed Kingdom) in a deliberately hard-to-guess era. In the epilogue he says he did this deliberately because he wanted the freedom of using imagination over fact. However, he writes so convincingly and in the same vein as some of my other favorite authors of historical fiction, that several times I came close to googling the "Xie" dynasty and Imperial family, believing they were real people.

"I hope my readers do not approach 'My Life as Emperor' with the idea that it is historical fiction; that is why I have set the novel in no particular time. Identifying allusions and determining the accuracy of events places too great a burden on you and on me. The world of women and the palace intrigues that you will encounter in this novel are but a scary dream on a rainy night; the suffering and slaughter reflect my worries and fears for all the people in all worlds, and nothing more."

Fourteen-year old Duanbai came to the throne after the sudden death of his Imperial father. To say he was unprepared for this honor or responsibility would be putting it mildly. He had no social graces, limited hobbies and no real intelligence. His favorite thing to do was to listen to caged crickets sing and he was afraid of going to bed alone because he had nightmares populated by "white demons . . . raising a sad wail."

But it wasn't long before he was intoxicated on the power that being king brings. He realized that it didn't really matter how smart or intelligent he was, what people really respected was someone they could fear. Being cruel seemed to come naturally to him and one of his first imperial acts was to cut off the tongues of concubines confined in the cold Palace, because their sorrowful wailing at night disturbed his sleep.

Most courts are places of intrigue, gossip, mind games and so on, but the one that Duanbai presided over seemed to have cruelty at the top of its list. Not only was Duanbai cruel, but so was his grandmother Madame Huangfu, the Empress Dowager who wielded the actual political power, Lady Ming (his mother) and Lady Ping (his wife). Infact, it's hard to find a single sympathetic character in the book, although, Duanbai's eunuch attendant and closest friend (their relationship is shrouded in ambiguity), Swallow, might come close.

Now, the dandy Prince Duanbai has two half brothers who believed with all their might that Duanwe, the elder of the two, and son of the imperial concubine Madame Yang, was the rightful heir. Throughout the young cruel king's time on the throne he is constantly afraid of Duanwe and of the day he might wrest the crown away from Duanbai. The day comes to pass but Duanwe, who is obviously more merciful than Duanbai, doesn't take the king's life but expels him from court and tells him to live life as a commoner. The dethroned king leaves to follow a childhood dream, that of becoming a tightrope walker in a travelling circus . Incidentally, I found that it is at this point that the story actually came alive for me, infact, it almost takes on the garb of a parable with Duanbai learning that loyalty, love and doing what you are most passionate about makes you a happier person than limitless power.

While this may be a little book, Su Tong skillfully manages to weave plenty imagery and symbolism into a tantalizing web of meanings. I have to confess I didn't discover all these meanings for myself but discovered them after reading this review. It is an indepth and academic review of "My Life as Emperor", so go ahead and read it for more insights. And in case you missed you missed those parts of the novel that alludes both to China's past, particularly the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and to the nation's uncertain future, please read this review....the author certainly manages to uncover far more depth and matter to this novel than I ever could. Fascinating stuff!

If Imperial China fascinates you as much as it does me, have a look at Royalty.nu's page on "Royalty in China" for some book recommendations.

Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang

Yesterday I finally saw Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" based on a story by Shanghai writer, Eileen Chang. The movie left such an impression on me, I just knew I had to grab a copy of "Lust, Caution" to see how true the movie was to the story. Besides that, I was very curious to read something by Eileen Chang. I had read that she was a Chinese wordsmith, a linguistic queen with a vocabulary so large she regaled her readers with a bewildering panoply of baroque names for ornaments, fabrics, plants, and bric-a-brac, many of which have become remote and quaint to us. But the most gratifying moments of Chang's prose belong to the many deliciously refreshing and always piquant metaphors and similes that enliven the descriptive passages between saucy and spirited dialogue. Now which reader can pass up such delicious-sounding prose? Certainly not me!

Lust, Caution is the title story of a collection of five stories, most of which were published in the 1940s when Eileen Chang was in her 20s. The title story, which was begun in the 1950s and not published until 1979, is set in China, during the Japanese occupation in World War II.

This is the story in a nutshell: A young student and actress named Wong Chia Chi has agreed to be the central figure in the assassination of a Japanese collaborator, Mr. Yee. Using the alias of Mak Tai Tai (Mrs. Ma) and the fictional Mr. Mak, Wong befriends Mr. Yee's wife, Yee Tai Tai, and eventually seduces her husband in order to kill him. However, just as she is about to have him killed, something unexpected happens which changes the course of both their lives. I cannot reveal exactly what happens because that would a huge spoiler!

As I couldn't find a copy of "Lust,Caution" at the library or even at my local bookstore, I downloaded the story from audible.com. It had a very short running time, only 90 mins, so the fact that it was made into a full length feature film (run time: two and a half hours) is perhaps a testament to the author's wonderful prose and plot. Chang has this way of giving the reader so much information but without being too wordy. She has also mastered the art of giving the reader the illusion that the prose and the pace is unhurried and leisurely when in actual fact there is a lot that is happening on every page! Besides the stylistic prose, the irresistible themes of lust, love, betrayal, kinship, jealousy, espionage etc. keep the reader (or listener) mesmerized.

Having said that all that, however,I benefited greatly by seeing Ang Lee's film first. The film provides a good historical background to the story, something that the story itself neglects to do, it also provides more background information on the characters. The story does make references to the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and the apathy of the people of Hongkong to the plight of the displaced people of Canton, but it's choppy and probably would require that the reader google some of the events to get a better idea of that time in history. However, the story is a treat to read and Chang's sparkling and witty dialogues are not to be missed...but if you want to enjoy it fully, watch the movie too!

The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Other Press
ISBN: 978-1-59051-326-2 (1-59051-326-6)

Pub Date: June 30, 2009
Price: $18.95

In recent years, there has been no shortage of expat-written nonfiction books set in Beijing, but fiction in the same category is hard to come by. That is why Jonathan Tel's new story collection, The Beijing of Possibilities, caught my eye the moment I saw it on the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2010 short list (thanks, Leela Soma and Rob) .

It's a slim little volume with a most intriguing cover art of a pretty Chinese lady with what appears to be sightless eyes. When friends and I first saw the cover design we had a nice discussion of what that might signify...was she looking "inside" herself or was she deliberately refusing to "see" that which is obvious to everyone else? Don't you just love cover art that intrigues? I did some research on the art and found out it has been taken from the Reed Darmon collection. Reed Darmon is the person responsible for the "Made in China" graphics book and you can learn more about it here.

To come back to the stories...all twelve invoke Beijing in some way or the other even if the stories themselves vary widely in time period and location. The most notable aspect of Tel's storytelling is how he recounts modern facts about China but interwoven with Chinese folk tales (and superstitions). The Monkey Legend seems to be his favorite one and the first story of the collection "Year of the Gorilla" begins with the sentence, "It's been a while since the Monkey King set out on his Journey to the West", with "A Journey to the West" being the title of this much-loved legend and folk tale.

Another trait I noticed is his ability to blend old China with the new and no story illustrates that better than "The Most Beautiful Woman In China.” which links together two thousand years of Chinese history, while being set in Beijing today! One generic character that makes his or her appearance in many of the stories is the 'Chinese migrant' and after reading a lot of topical articles on China I have come to the realization that Beijing, even more than Shanghai, is a mecca for the Chinese people...it is the land of opportunity, the land where dreams come true or as Tel himself describes in the title, it is the land full of possibilities.

"Beijing is the center of the universe. Ask anybody who lives there. “The true Beijinger secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

—in a foreword by Helan Xiao

One of my favorite migrant characters in this collection is from the title story. Miss Xu is a fisherman's daughter but "foster" mother to the child of a young couple in Beijing. The couple have hired Miss Xu to look after their as-yet-unborn child because they are too busy to care for the child themselves..in ten or twelve years time they'll be ready to take the child to live with them. Unfortunately the child dies before they could hand it over to Miss Xu but because she had been registered in Bejing as a "foster mother" Miss Xu lands herself an unexpected ticket to residency in Beijing which is to most Chinese what an American green card is to refugees! Ofcourse, being a "hick" from Hainan (a sleepy little fishing village) she was treated as an outcast in Beijing which makes for a very moving story.

Tel also has this ability to infuse his stories with playful plots and language. Amusing, but a little sad too, is "The Book of Auspicious and Inauspicious Dreams" where a young, modern couple, during renovations to their 1960's home, chance upon a rusty tin of souvenirs buried in a wall of their suburban Beijing house. Realizing it must belong to the previous owner they do everything to try to return the tin, only to be met with exclamations of protests from the previous owner who insisted she had never laid eyes on the tin before and that she "loved Chairman Mao more than her own mother and father" which reminds the reader of a turbulent time in China's history where to be a lover of the arts or to have "western" things meant having a "bourgeois" background which in turn meant being sent to the villages for "reeducation"...something that was a tough and humiliating experience for most intellectuals.

I found a couple of the stories had the overall effect of looking at a subtly distorted mirror but for the most part Tel's prose and plots are smart, entertaining, observant and insightful. It's most definitely a collection to cherish.

Oh, and before I go...I haven't been able to explain the girl on the cover. My best guess is that she is "Little Yu" from the heart warmingly sad story, "The Three Lives of Little Yu" about a childless couple who adopt a little girl whom they call "Yu" only to have her snatched away by the god of death. They adopt a second girl and call her "Yu" too, but the same fate awaits her. When the third girl, again called "Yu" enters their family it is implied that she is a reincarnation of the previous little girls. So could the girl on the cover have been Yu between her lives on earth? I guess I am getting carried away. I'll bet you not even Jonathan Tel thought about his cover as much as I have! :) Oh and whatever you do, don't miss the last story....there's a nice twist in the tale there, a brilliant narrative coup!

Two insightful reviews that might interest you are:

L. Dean Murphy at The Book Reporter

and Happy Reader at Book Closet

And finally, some entertainment! A clip from the pop opera, "Monkey: Journey to the West"

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin

(Coming soon: 08 April in the UK and 29June in the US)

For a polygamist like Baba Segi, his collection of wives and a gaggle of children are the symbol of prosperity, success and validation of his manhood. Everything runs reasonably smoothly in the patriarchal home, until wife number four intrudes on this family romance.

Bolanle, a graduate amongst the semi-literate wives, is hated from the start. Baba Segi's glee at bagging a graduate doesn't help matters. Worse, Bolanle's arrival threatens to do more than simply ruffle feathers. She's unwittingly set to expose a secret that her co-wives intend to protect, at all costs.

Lola Shoneyin's light and ironic touch exposes not only the rotten innards of Baba Segi's polygamous household in this cleverly plotted story; it also shows how women no educated or semi-literate, women in contemporary Nigeria can be as restricted, controlled and damaged by men - be they fathers, husbands, uncles, rapists - as they've never been.

Black Mamba Boy Nadifa Mohamed

Harper Collins Canada

Downtown Mogadishu today is beat-up and bone-white from the sun and a coating of dust. It is overlaid with a deceptive grid of empty streets. Most buildings are ransacked shells frozen in time or have simply vanished. Today, when we think of Somalia we think civil war, Somali pirates, Islamic fundamentalism, so how very refreshing to chance upon "Black Mamba Boy" which takes us back to a thriving Somalia of yesteryear, and not just Somalia, but Djibouti, Sudan, Eritrea, Egypt...a veritable tour of North-East Africa in the mid-30's.

Let me explain: "Black Mamba Boy"by Somali-British author Nadifa Mohamed is based on the true story of the author’s father’s life. Opening in 1930's Aden we are introduced to Jama, a ten year-old Somali boy, a street kid, whose mother dies unexpectedly thus leaving him alone in this world.

" Jama is forced home to his native Somalia, the land of his nomadic ancestors. War is on the horizon and the fascist Italian forces who control parts of east Africa are preparing for battle. Yet Jama cannot rest until he discovers whether his father, who has been absent from his life since he was a baby, is alive somewhere. And so begins an epic journey which will take Jama north through Djibouti, war-torn Eritrea and Sudan, to Egypt. And from there, aboard a ship transporting Jewish refugees just released from German concentration camp, across the seas to Britain and freedom."

OK, my challenge here as a "reviewer" is how to give you my impressions without gushing or using a great many superlatives, so I'll just say this: if you choose to read the book, you're in for an amazing ride through the dusty, noisy but bustling streets of the some of the most important cities of North East Africa in the '30's. From the vast sandy deserts of Sudan to narrow busy alleys in Somalia, from the tree-lined manicured boulevards of Djibouti to the emerald-green landscape with juicy mango trees of Abyssinia, you will see it all!

Mohamed's prose zings with the vibrancy of North African life, an unfamiliar landscape of strange tribes and tongues, bizarre rituals, superstitions and tribal kinship. The sensitive way in which she handles Jama's relationships with his family and kinsmen, tugs at one's heartstrings. In a historical context I cannot vouch for Mohamed's accuracy because I know so little about that area and in that time period, but it is told so well, you get completely swept up by the events and happenings.

But central to the story is suffering...the suffering of the African people at the hands of their colonizers. Mohamed's acute and unsparing descriptive powers render vivid everything from Aden street chaos to traditional Palestinian wedding in Khan Younis, but her clipped depiction of the death by torture of a young Somalian man at the hands of two drunk Italians made me gasp out loud and pushed me way out of my comfort zone into a place I wasn't sure I wanted to be. And that's not a bad thing because when I read I want to be astonished, I want to be moved, I want to be shaken to the core and Mohamed succeeds in doing this.

Having said all this though, for me, the most moving part of the account is when Jama finds employment as a deck hand on board the "Runnymede Park" at Haifa, Palestine. "Runnymede Park" was a British prison ship carrying thousands of Jewish refugees originally from Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Treblinka who were denied permission to disembark in Palestine (their Promised Land) but instead taken back to Europe to be made an example out of (thereby deterring other would-be Jewish immigrants from making the trip to Palestine). Her descriptions of the agony (physical and mental) that the poor refugees suffered are so vivid, I could literally hear the crash of broken dreams and feel the dejection in my own chest.

If you enjoy Africa, history, travel (the story weaves its way through a labyrinth of countries), stories of exile and survival...this one is definitely for you!

Luxurious Hearses in "Say You're One of Them" by Uwem Akpan

• Hardcover: 368 pages
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• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (Jun 9 2008)
• 
  
• Language: English

"Luxurious Hearses" is this ( "Say You're One of Them") collection's fourth and longest story but perhaps its most important. I see it as important because more than any other story I have read here so far, it is this one that brings to life the political, economic and religious strife we read so much about in Africa.

The story, set in Nigeria, illuminates the political situation of Nigeria, the poverty of the people in the Nigerian Delta, the tension between the Muslims in the North and the Christians in the south and what happens when innocent people get caught in between.

After you read this longish nouvella you come away, seeing with new eyes why every now and again Nigeria plunges into Muslim-Christian riots and why, despite all the oil that Nigeria possesses, its people are so poor.

Our protagonist in this story is a 16-year old boy called Jubril who is forced to head south (towards the Christian part of Nigeria) after riots broke out in his very-Muslim city of Khamfa which is in the north. Ordinarily Jubril may not have had to run away, but when his own Muslim friends turned against him for having a Christian father (whom he had never seen or known) he decided that if he was interested in saving his life it would be prudent for him to leave his town and Muslim mother (and her family) and head south to be reunited with his Christian dad.


The story of his journey from the North to South in the midst of some of the worst religious riots Nigeria has ever seen with a host of wonderfully- colourful characters that are his bus companions; his fears and insecurities about heading to a part of the country that is so alien to him and his perpetual fear of being found out as a Muslim in bus full of Christian refugees is riveting, suspenseful and unputdownable! The reader is as tense as Jubril who is forced to try and blend in with the other people on the bus, a task made much more difficult because his right hand was lopped off when he was arrested for stealing a goat months before.

As always, Akpan's writing holds you spellbound. Most of the story takes place on the bus with occasional flashbacks to Jubrail's life in Khamfa before he had to flee. As a reader you are privy to all the conversations that place on the bus...the fears, egos, anger and other emotions that the passengers bring with them; power dynamics between the well off and the not so well off,the sick and the healthy. Many a time, like Oprah, I got so claustrophobic from being on that bus I had this strong urge to jump off and yet, the writing and the thought of what might happen next kept me glued to the pages.

"An Ex-Mas Feast" was audacious, "The Fattening of Gabon" was downright sad, but "Luxurious Hearses" is gruesome. You're going to need a strong stomach to endure the second half of the novel. Gruesome it might be but at no point do you get the feeling the author is aiming for sensationalism, instead, you come away feeling deeply for the characters, the victims and the persecutors alike, for you come to understand that each man is simply doing all he can to survive.

Since each of the five stories in this book are set in different countries in Africa, you might want to use Howard French's "A Continent for the Taking" or even Richard Dowden's "Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles" as a companion read. I found both very helpful in explaining Africa to me.

The Fattening of Gabon from "Say You Are One of Them" by Uwem Akpan

"Fattening for Gabon" is Uwem Akpan's second story (nouvella length at 130 pages) in the collection, "Say You're One of Them".

It starts off innocently enough with a young (10-year old) boy narrating how his maternal uncle offers to take him and his 5-year old sister to live with him on the border of Benin and Gabon because the boy's parents are dying of AIDS and too poor and sick to look after the children, but the story very gradually starts to take on a sinister tone which gets completely brutal towards the end.

“Selling your child or nephew could be more difficult than selling other kids”: that is the blunt line with which “Fattening for Gabon” begins. I wish so much Akpan hadn't used that opening line because it really does give it all away. The story is so beautifully written that had Akpan waited to reveal this, say about halfway through the story, I think the reader would have been shaken to the core (and which reader doesn't mind being shaken?) Anyway, what's done is done and this other child-narrated story succeeds in provoking the whole gamut of emotions, from incredulity to disgust and from confusion to absolute fear in the reader. For me, the biggest issue here was child manipulation, I could have screamed at all of the adults in this story and cheerfully lined up against a wall to be shot. I know, I know some of you might think I am over reacting but you know, when Uwem Akpan was interviewed he stated that all these stories were drawn from real people he met and counselled in his years as a Jesuit Priest. Just to know that there are adults like this makes my blood boil.

Again, as in the previous story, one of Akpan's strengths is in how he slips into the skins of his characters no matter what gender or age they might be. He also has such a gift for description and narration. There are several scenes that stand out for me in this story, the main one being the Thanksgiving service at church that Fofo Kpee(the uncle) organizes in order to give thanks for his (ill-begotten) gain. Akpan describes the procession, the dancing, the characters, their clothes, the gifts, the priest's invocations, the offertory to god and the elation the family feels to be given so much importance on that day, so vividly it is literally like watching the service unfold on a cinematic screen. What a writer this man is!

Something I liked very much (and that's probably because I listened to this on audio as well as read it in print) is Akpan's frequent use of the local dialect in the dialogue. Four colloquial languages were used in this particular story...English, French Idaatcha and Egun sometimes in the same paragraph. I have spoken to people who found that distracting...not me!!! I guess knowing a little French does help speed the read along.

Last, but not least...the title is very conversation-worthy...but that, I'm afraid, will be a whole different post!

If you would like to read an excerpt from "Fattening of Gabon"..please go here

Or you might want to watch the Oprah Book Club interview and book discussion with the author here