Reading Matters

'A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar' by Suzanne Joinson

Fiction - hardcover; Bloomsbury; 384 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Suzanne Joinson's debut novel, A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar, is a fascinating account of a trio of English missionaries working in a Muslim-dominated region of China in 1923. It also features a dual narrative, set in present day London, in which a young woman learns she has inherited an apartment full of belongings, including a pet owl, from a stranger.

A narrative composed of diary entries

The missionary side of the story unfolds in a series of diary entries by Evagaline English, who is penning a lady cyclist's guide to Kashgar, hence the title of the book. Eva, as she is known, is in Kashgar, East Turkestan, with her sister, Lizzie, and their benefactress, Millicent, to help set up a Christian mission on behalf of the Missionary Order of the Steadfast Face.

The book opens in dramatic fashion when the trio, somewhere in the desert, stumble upon a woman giving birth by the roadside. They stop to help, and Millicent delivers the baby using a pair of forceps. The mother dies, presumably from blood loss, and a crowd of onlookers blame Millicent for her death.

'They say we have taken the girl to give ourselves strength, and that we plan to steal the baby and eat it.' Lizzie spoke quickly, in that odd, high voice. Her ability with this impenetrable Turki language is much better than mine.
'She died in childbirth, natural causes, as you can all very well see,' Millicent shouted uselessly in English, and then repeated it in Turki. Lizzie set about bringing water in our tankards and a blanket.
'They are demanding that we are shot.'

From thereon in, the three women tread a dangerous path. Not only are they in a Muslim-dominated area of China — where other religions are not tolerated — they now have a baby who does not belong to them in their possession and are being charged with murder and witchcraft.

While under a kind of "house arrest" the baby's welfare falls largely to Eva. Meanwhile militant-like Millicent is hellbent on converting the locals and dreamy Lizzie spends her days taking photographs. The narrative charts the tensions between the trio and the local community as it rises from resistance to calamity. More interestingly, it also charts the tensions between the three women, each of whom has a secret to keep.

A present-day story set in London

The present-day narrative, which is told in the third person, follows Frieda, a woman who lives alone in a South London apartment. Frieda has a busy job that involves lots of travel; she's estranged from her mother; and has been involved in a long-term affair with a married man that is unravelling at the seams.

Then two startling things happen to her, which turn her life upside down: she finds a homeless Yemeni man living on her doorstep and befriends him; and then she receives a letter informing her that she has inherited a council flat full of property, including a caged owl, belonging to a woman she doesn't know. According to council records, the woman is Frieda's next-of-kin.

As you can tell, these two narratives are poles apart, but part of the mystery and enjoyment of reading A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar is trying to determine the link between them — and it's not as obvious as one might think.

Satisfying storytelling

Joinson writes each thread in a different prose style — the first has an old-fashioned feel and is reminiscent of the period in which it is set, the second is more contemporary in tone and style. And while some readers might find this juxtaposition jarring, I quite enjoyed moving backwards and forwards in time like this, although I much preferred the missionary storyline, probably because Eva's voice was so engaging. I also enjoyed the judicious use of cliffhangers, which keeps the momentum going.

As I read this book I felt that I was going on a rather intimate journey, because Joinson captures periods and settings so vividly that exotic places, such as Kashgar, come alive on paper. Her attention to detail — especially in terms of historical facts and cultural references — pay off without you ever feeling as if she's shoehorned in a bunch of research just to get the "flavour" right.

And while the title is somewhat of a misnomer (there's not much cycling in this book at all), A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar is a gorgeous read, tempered by a lovely sense of wry humour, that whisks you away to another world. It's peopled by a cast of unforgettable characters and covers their journeys — physical, emotional and metaphorical — with care and compassion. It's a perfect rainy day read.

'The Flowers of War' by Geling Yan

Fiction - hardcover; Harvill Secker; 256 pages; 2012. Translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman.

Geling Yan's The Flowers of War is set during the Nanking Massacre — sometimes known as the Rape of Nanking — in which an estimated 300,000 people were killed when Japanese forces captured the Chinese city in December 1937.

An American church offers shelter

In this fictionalised account, a group of 16 terrified schoolgirls find safety in the attic of an American church. St Mary Magdalene is protected by a high wall and regarded as neutral territory in the Second Sino-Japanese War. It is run by Father Engelmann, an American who has lived in China for 30 years, with the help of Deacon Fabio Adornato, another Westerner who was born to Italian-American parents and raised in Yangzhou.

But a day after the girls have been taken in, a group of women clamber over the wall demanding equal protection. They are prostitutes from the nearby Qin Huai River brothels and they do not want to be taken by the Japanese soldiers as "comfort women". Father Engelmann tries to turn them away, claiming he does not have enough food, water or shelter, but he eventually agrees they can stay in the cellar — for two days.

To make matters worse, two wounded Chinese soldiers secretly enter the compound. They have survived a shocking massacre and have nowhere else to go. Again, Father Engelmann tries to turn them away but relents and they are housed in the cellar with the prostitutes.

Tension between those seeking refuge

The story basically shows how these four divergent group of people — the religious men, the prostitutes, the schoolgirls from privileged backgrounds and the soldiers — must live together under extraordinary circumstances, where prejudice and tension abounds, food and water is in short supply, and fear of Japanese evasion is ever present.

I had expected The Flowers of War to be dark and very moving, but apart from the odd moment of horror, the story generally falls flat. Part of the problem is the lack of a central character with which to identify, so an emotional connection cannot be made. And Engelmann, Fabio and the schoolgirl Shujuan feel too distant — and cold-hearted — to really care about.

The prose, which occasionally shimmers, largely seems all tell and not much show. It's not exactly pedestrian, but it does feel as if you're reading the bones of a story which is in need of a bit more meat.

Prejudiced attitudes

And, if I am honest, I found it difficult to believe that a 13-year-old schoolgirl, Shujuan, could be so prejudiced against the prostitutes. She is fascinated by their antics and often spies on them through a hole in the floor, but she is also so vehemently opposed to them, I couldn't help but wonder where that kind of hateful attitude had sprung from? Were privately educated schoolgirls in 1930s China taught that prostitutes were the lowest form of life? Or was it something she learned from her rich parents?

It didn't seem to add up to me — and nor did the epilogue, which felt tacked on and clumsy. Here, nine years after the massacre, Shujuan is just coming to realise how these women may have saved her life and is trying to track them down, because "if she didn't remember them, who would?"

It's a great shame that The Flowers of War was so dull, because this is an important — and dramatic — story needing to be told. Perhaps the film adaptation, directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Christian Bale, is better. It wouldn't be hard.

'The Mao Case' by Qui Xiaolong

Fiction - hardcover; Sceptre; 304 pages; 2009.

The Mao Case by Qui Xiaolong is the sixth and latest book in the Inspector Chen series, which is set in modern day China. But the author, who writes in English, actually lives in the US.

I've not read the previous five novels, but I did not find this a hindrance to what proved to be an enjoyable if somewhat unconventional detective story.

Chief Inspector Chen Cao is not your average run-of-the-mill police officer. He is young, idealistic and takes pride in his work. He loves literature and poetry and does a nice sideline in translation. But his personal life is complicated: his girlfriend, Ling, lives hundreds of miles away in Beijing and their relationship is a tumultuous one. In fact, in the opening chapter of The Mao Case Chen is informed by telephone that Ling has dumped him and married a man more appropriate to her social standing (she's known as a HCC — a high cadre's child — because her father is a top-ranking Party official).

But this is merely a sub-plot. The main story involves Chen going undercover to investigate a rather delicate matter involving Chairman Mao. He must take a softly softly approach, not least because "any slander against Mao, the founder of the Chinese Communist Party, will affect the legitimacy of the Party".

The Party believe that Mao may have given some unspecified material to Shang Yunguan, a 1950s movie star he is said to have had an affair with. The Party want the material back, even though they don't know what it is and whether it even exists. It's not something that can be discussed openly, because that would confirm the rumours about Mao's illicit private life, something which must be avoided at all costs.

A party official, Minister Huang, enlists Chen to undertake this highly secret investigation after Internal Security fail to turn anything up.

"She [Shang] could have taken — or been given — something from him. There were many opportunities."
"Something from Mao?" Chen was instantly alert, though hardly able to smother the sarcasm is his voice. "What could that possibly be?"
"We don't know."

The minister believes the material may have been passed to Shang's daughter, Qian — who died in an accident at the end of the Cultural Revolution — which was then inherited by her granddaughter Jiao. The Party is suspicious of Jiao, because she quit her job a year ago and moved into a luxurious apartment. Since then she has frequently been seen at parties — attended by Westerners — that are being hosted by a mysterious elderly art teacher and 1930s expert called Mr Xie, "who bears a deep grudge against Mao".

As part of the investigation, which swings between Shanghai and Beijing, Chen reinvents himself as a businessman and writer researching Shanghai's 1930s glory days in order to infiltrate Mr Xie's glamorous parties. Along the way he meets strange businessmen, Triads, beautiful women, Chairman Mao himself and all sorts of writerly types.

The plot is occasionally confusing — and preposterous. But Xiaolong's descriptions of China — where the cities of Beijing and Shanghai are being seemingly transformed overnight and where the gap between rich and poor is ever widening — more than makes up for these minor flaws. As do the descriptions of food, particularly Chen's visit to the Fangshan Restaurant, which specialises in imperial cuisine. Here, he dines on genuine Beijing duck and experiences...

the celebrated five ways of eating a duck: crisp duck skin slices wrapped in pancake, duck meat slices fried with green garlic, duck feet immersed in wine, duck gizzard stir-fried with green vegetables, and duck soup.

Mind you, the constant references to Chinese poetry, literature and sayings, which give the narrative a peculiar charm, begin to feel tiresome and heavy-handed by the half-way point. We know the book is set in China; we don't need to be constantly reminded of it in such an obivous way.

That said, the narrative is well paced and builds plenty of momentum, culminating in a suitably heart-hammering and dramatic, if somewhat ambiguous, ending. It's safe to say this was my first Inspector Chen novel and it's unlikely to be my last.

The other novels in the series are: Death of a Red Heroine (2000), A Loyal Character Dancer (2002), When Red Is Black (2004), A Case of Two Cities (2006) and Red Mandarin Dress (2007). The seventh novel, Don't Cry Tai Lake, is due for publication in September 2012.

'Chinese Whispers: A Journey into Betrayal' by Jan Wong

Non-fiction - paperback; Atlantic Books; 320 pages; 2010.

Journalist Jan Wong is a third-generation Canadian of Chinese heritage. In 1972, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, she became one of only two Westerners admitted to Beijing University, where she studied Mandarin. She was 19, impressionable and a proud Maoist, so when a fellow student, Yin Luoyi, told her she wanted help fleeing China for the United States — a Maoist "crime" — Jan did not hesitate to tell the authorities.

In one thoughtless, misguided moment, I destroyed someone's life. [...] At the time I did not give it much thought. I certainly did not understand the enormity of what I'd done. I recorded the incident in my diary, and forgot about it.

Thirty-three years later Jan decides to return to Beijing — dragging her husband and two teenage sons with her — to look for Yin Luoyi. She knows she may never find her — "How will I find a stranger in a country of 1.3 billion?" — but feels compelled to try, if only to keep her conscience at bay. But with no plan of action and just a 28-day stay, it truly seems an impossible mission.

Chinese Whispers details Jan's quest to find the woman she wronged. But the engaging narrative also doubles as a travelogue as Jan describes a city — and a nation — in the grips of a radical transformation. It's two years before the 2008 Beijing Olympics and buildings are being knocked down and replaced, seemingly overnight. There are new roads, new cars. The trappings of enormous wealth, rubbing up against poverty, are everywhere. This is not the city that Jan left behind all those years ago — tracking down old friends, foes and comrades is going to be more difficult than ever before.

In many ways this book reads like a detective story, as Jan slowly uncovers clues, stumbles over red herrings and runs into dead ends. But it is also a wonderfully evocative account of China's recent history, from the Cultural Revolution to the present day, detailing the changing face of its political, social and economic systems. Indeed, it's probably one of the best portraits of a nation trying to deal — or not deal — with its past that you're ever likely to find.

Her narrative style is engaging and effusive and she has a lovely self-deprecating sense of humour. (I love that she calls her husband Norman "Fat Paycheck" in a nod to the Chinese name of Yulu that he was given when he lived in Beijing for some 20 years — apparently Yu means riches and lu means an official's salary in ancient China, hence Jan's tongue-in-cheek translation.)

Perhaps the only problem with the book is that it is now slightly dated — it was first published in Canada in 2007 as Beijing Confidential — but given China's rapid pace of development, particularly in the past five years, that should come as no surprise.

Chinese Whispers is one of those books for which you need to clear your schedule — once you pick it up, the story is so gripping it's a wrench to put it down. I made the mistake of starting it in a lunch-hour and then it was a race to get home after work to continue where I'd left off. Don't say you haven't been warned...

'The Man from Beijing' by Henning Mankell

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 560 pages; 2011. Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Despite liking Nordic crime novels, I've never quite got around to reading anything by Henning Mankell, arguably the grand master of the genre. I've been reluctant to read his Inspector Wallander mysteries because there are 11 books in the series, a major commitment for someone like me who would want to read them all in the correct order.

But The Man From Beijing is a stand-alone book, so there was no need to worry about over-committing myself. As it turns out, it was an entertaining read, and one that was not terribly demanding, but I'm not sure that it's encouraged me to go down the Wallander route -- although I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise.

The story starts off with a real show-stopper: nineteen people, all related, are slaughtered in a sleepy Swedish village in the dead of winter. It is Sweden's biggest mass murder. The media are crawling all over it, but the police don't have a clue as to who might have committed it. Was it a lunatic gone mad with a machete? Or a thoroughly planned exercise by a team of killers? What, exactly, was the motive?

But The Man From Beijing is not a police procedural. The story is told largely through the eyes of Birgitta Roslin, a perfectly nice middle-aged judge from Helsingborg, who is distantly related to a couple of the victims. In her working life Birgitta has seen and done it all (her experiences, related as back story, serve to highlight the dark underbelly of Swedish society). When she is signed off work with high blood pressure, she decides to fill her days investigating the mass murder -- as you do.

She has a few run-ins with the detective in charge of the investigation -- a bullish woman by the name of Vivi Sundberg -- but on the whole it's clear that Birgitta is miles ahead of the police in terms of finding leads and potential suspects. But how can she connect the red ribbon found at the scene with a nineteenth century diary? And who was the mysterious Chinese man who booked into a local hotel the night before the murder?

Just as Birgitta's investigation begins to really take off, Mankell does something unexpected. He takes the story back to 1863, at a time when three Chinese brothers were press-ganged into working on the railroad that links the American east coast with the west. What does this have to do with the murder in Sweden more than a century later? Ah, that would be telling, wouldn't it?

I think the major problem I had with this book was its structure. It morphs into a kind of political thriller, and the event which opens the book in such stunning style gets almost forgotten as Mankell builds up an extensive web of corruption across three continents: Europe, Asia and Africa. 

As you might expect from the title, a large chunk of the book is set in China. In fact, Birgitta, who wanted to join the Red Guard in her youth, visits the country on a spur-of-the-moment decision to continue her unofficial enquiries (the fact there is no mention of acquiring a travel visa was just one of many factual omissions that annoyed me while reading this book).

The China depicted here is modern and vibrant, but it is also deeply divided. Just as Mankell makes undisguised commentary about Sweden's social problems through the criminal cases over which Birgitta must preside, in the Chinese parts of the novel he makes more undisguised commentary about a rampant economic system, Communism and corruption. Indeed, he ties them all together, and then throws in a semi-plausible plot about China wanting to "export" its poverty-stricken peasants to Zimbabwe and Mozambique in exchange for helping to develop those countries. (I rather suspect Mankell read Mark Leonard's What Does China Think? as part of his research, because he regurgitates a lot of the facts that Leonard presents in his book, including the notion that China donates huge sums of money to African nations that have been turned down for loans by the International Monetary Fund.)

As a thriller, the story has a sufficiently menacing undertone to make one keep turning the pages. But as a crime novel it lacks punch, probably because the killer is clearly identified very early on in the book. Mankell then spends some 300-plus pages explaining how that killer came to do what he did.

On the whole, I enjoyed The Man From Beijing as a "holiday read" (I was travelling around Ireland at the time), but it's a woolly book in need of some tight editing. It is easily 200 pages too long. Still, the saving grace is Birgitta, a convincing character with just the right touch of paranoia, to keep the story pedalling along.

'On a Chinese Screen' by W. Somerset Maugham

Non-fiction - Kindle edition; Vintage Classics; 137 pages; 2010.

This is one of those books I probably would never have bothered reading had it not been for two important facts: it was a free download from manybooks.net and it was about China.

What I hadn't clocked when I first began reading it was this: there is no narrative thread holding this book together. It is merely a collection of pen-portraits of various people, mainly expat officials, that Somerset Maugham met on his travels through China in the early 1920s.

There are 58 short sketches in total, and while each one is expertly and vividly drawn, it does not make for an effortless read because it is simply too disjointed. It's almost like reading someone's notebook rather than a published book.

Its importance, I guess, is more as an historical "document", because Maugham's "reportage" offers a glimpse of Europeans living in China during the interwar years. What he depicts is far from pleasant. These are people who don't give a damn about the culture or the people. They simply cling onto the vestiges of home. No one bothers to learn the language or befriend the natives. Assuming that Maugham's descriptions of British diplomats, Catholic missionaries and the like are accurate, this is a rather damning portrayal of the English abroad.

This is a good example:

China bored them all, they did not want to speak of that; they only knew just so much about it as was necessary to their business, and they looked with distrust upon any man who studied the Chinese language. Why should he unless he were a missionary or a Chinese Secretary at the Legation? You could hire an interpreter for twenty-five dollars a month and it was well known that all those fellows who went in for Chinese grew queer in the head.

Funnily enough, I get the impression that many of his sketches are tongue-in-cheek and that Maugham knows full well that these people are truly hideous in outlook and attitude.

Indeed, the book works best when Maugham offers up his own opinion of the Chinese natives (mainly "coolies") and the places he visits (mainly villages along the Yangtze) -- he seems far more accepting, interested and intrigued by his travel adventures than his British counterparts.

There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent, and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down in the depth of the valley. Menacingly, the grim watch towers, stark and foursquare, at due intervals stood at their posts.

The book, however, is probably best read by genuine W. Somerset Maugham fans, those with a deep interest in China or budding authors wishing to learn the art of descriptive writing.

It was first published in 1922.

'Red Dust' by Ma Jian

Non-fiction - Kindle edition; CCV Digital; 336 pages; 2010. Translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew.

I'm not a huge fan of travelogues, but I decided to read Red Dust based on the strength of Ma Jian's superb novel Beijing Coma and Max Cairnduff's excellent review.

I read it on my Kindle while in China last month, and found much of Jian's descriptions, particularly of places I had been such as the ancient city of Xi'an and the Ghost City of Fengdu, very authentic.

The book chronicles Jian's travels throughout China during the 1980s, a time in which travel for the average Chinese citizen was banned without the necessary paperwork.

He claims to go travelling because: "I want to see my country, every river, every mountain. I want to see different people, different lives. [...] I just want to know it, see it with my own eyes." But that is the sanitised version.

Before he hit the road, Jian was an official photographer for the propaganda department of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. He spent most of his free time as an artist. His house, a "crumbling old shack", in Beijing was used by fellow creatives -- writers, painters, poets and dissidents -- as a secret meeting point.

He was labelled as a "questionable youth" by his bosses, who believed his "spare time activities" indicated he had been poisoned by "bourgeois Spiritual Pollution". He escaped the clutches of Party Officials waging their Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution by forging his own travel documents and heading for the desert. (Just as well, because within a matter of years more than a million people were arrested and nearly 200,000 executed as part of the Campaign.)

It was 1983 and he was 30 years old. He had hoped to find spiritual enlightenment along the way, but as most travellers are wont to discover, Jian ended up learning a great deal about his country -- good, bad and ugly -- and the people who lived in it.

He was on the move for three years before he decided to return to Beijing.

Initially he revels in the freedom that travel provided:

Men are like swallows, when autumn arrives they long to fly away. Life moves with the same rhythm as the sky and the earth. It changes as sun changes into moon and day into night. If they told me to return to Beijing now, I would charge straight into those ramparts.  I would rather crack my skull and die than go back to moulder in that dank city.

But later, after some close encounters and a constant struggle to earn enough cash to get by, he realises that freedom is not the be all and end all. "Walking through the wilds freed me from worries and fears, but this is not real freedom," he wrote. "You need money to be free."

While I found Red Dust an easy read and enjoyed discovering more about China through Jian's eyes, I did have some problems with the book.

The first -- which can be dismissed as my own fault, rather than the author's -- was Jian's narrative voice. I simply did not like it, because it often came across as arrogant and sexist (not dissimilar, in fact, to his fictional Dai Wei in Beijing Coma).

The second is simply the repetition of Jian arriving in a new place (usually broke and worried that the authorities will discover his papers are illegal), befriending someone, finding out about the local culture and then leaving. Once or twice is interesting, but when the bulk of the narrative is just relating a succession of these encounters, as different as each may be, it does become wearing. (Max Cairnduff's review also finds this a major failing.)

Of course, that's not enough to dismiss the book completely. There's a lot in Red Dust which provides food for thought, particularly as it is set just as China's economy was beginning to open up thanks to Deng Xiaoping's reforms. Jian thought that this would help his people, until he meets many rural folk who tell him otherwise. One chap says:

"A free economy won't make bicycles or sewing machines grow from the earth. [...] All the young men have left to find work in the cities. They come back at Spring Festival with new watches and big bags of clothes."

I'd love to know how opinions and attitudes have changed in the 25 years since Jian went on his travels, but sadly Jian will never be able to retrace his steps to find out. He's no longer welcome in his homeland and has been resident in London since 1999. His books are banned in China.

'Beijing Coma' by Ma Jian

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 666 pages; 2009. Translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew.

It's been a very long time since I read a novel that I know will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Ma Jian's Beijing Coma is by no means a perfect book -- it's far too lengthy for a start and the lead character is arrogant and annoying by turns -- but it is a powerful, compelling read, a story that bears witness to a shocking event that the Chinese authorities would rather you did not know about: the Tianamen Square massacre of 1989.

Although the book is fictional, it is based on first-hand experience and, from what I can gather having now read this wikipedia entry, is historically accurate. Only the names have been changed.

Beijing Coma remains banned in China, along with everything else that Ma Jian has written. (He now lives in London with his translator wife, Flora Drew.)

At more than 600-pages long, it requires a major commitment from the reader, but it is worth the effort. It is a deeply moving account of the 1989 student pro-democracy movement, culminating in the massacre in which thousands of Chinese citizens were killed. Unusually, it is told from the point of view of one of the students, Dai Wei, who is in a coma. As a concept, this shouldn't work. But in Ma Jian's hands this wholly original approach is devastatingly effective.

As Dai Wei lays in a bed in his mother's apartment waiting to die -- he was felled by a bullet during the military crackdown -- he takes in everything happening around him. Much of the time he reminisces about his past, and through this we learn of his childhood growing up in 1980s Communist China, where his father was labelled a "rightist" and sentenced to 20 years in a prison farm, and his mother was a fine, upstanding citizen who toed the Party line.

Later, he escapes the claustrophobia of the family home to attend university, where he spends more time chasing girls than studying. He eventually gets swept up in the idealism of the pro-democracy movement and finds himself head of security during the protests which begin in April 1989.

He recalls the student movement's slow disintegration, as boisterous enthusiasm and idealism makes way for in-fighting, internal power struggles and corruption all because it lacked a truly united front.

But Dai Wei's memories of the past are constantly interrupted by events happening around him in his mother's cramped and shabby apartment. Because he was injured during a massacre that the Government denies ever happened, he is not allowed medical treatment. It is up to his mother, as sole carer, to do what she can to help him: she gets drugs and IV equipment on the black market, and occasionally has documents forged to allow him to be treated in hospital. It is a perilous, on-the-edge and inhumane existence for both parties.

His mother is anxious for her son to die to relieve her of this terrible burden -- and she makes no bones about telling him this, not knowing that despite Dai Wei's vegetative state he can hear everything she says.

At times the narrative feels like a dark comedy (there's one instance when Dai Wei's urine is seen as a miracle cure and people come from far and wide to buy it from his mother's apartment), but for the most part it is a damning indictment of China's human rights record.

It is also a fascinating insight into the massive economic and physical changes that Beijing underwent between 1989 and the 2008 Olympic Games, as old buildings were torn down to make way for modern ones, and local residents took advantage of new investment.

But for Dai Wei's mother this change is not welcome. As she juggles her son's medical needs with her own struggle to survive, she is ordered by the Government to leave her apartment so that it can be demolished to make way for new buildings as part of the Beijing Olympic bid. Her refusal to move, to succumb to the Government's demands, not only shows how much her attitude to the Government has changed (she was once a model Communist citizen), it provides a glimpse of a country thundering ahead so fast that only the fittest, strongest and most adaptable can survive.

These dual narratives are interleaved in a seamless fashion, so that only the tense -- past for Dei Wei's memories, present for events happening around his sick bed -- orientates the reader.

A word of caution, however: the level of detail in this novel may be off-putting to some, because Ma Jian records the minutiae of student life and every tiny step of the protest movement. I admit that I did, at times, wonder if it was worth me ploughing ahead. I'm pleased that I persisted, because the sheer weight of the information presented builds momentum. By the time you reach the horrifying climax -- the tanks rolling in and the soldiers mowing down innocent bystanders -- it's like being hit over the head by a tonne of bricks, as the full force of all that detail rains down on you. It is, without a doubt, one of the most dramatic endings to a novel I've ever read.

Beijing Coma held my attention for an entire month. It is a brave and audacious book, brimming with idealism, chaos and horror. If you like your fiction rooted in fact, with a choppy, fast-paced narrative, and a conclusion that leaves you reeling, then do add this one to the list.

 

'Factory Girls' by Leslie T. Chang

Non-fiction - Kindle edition; Picador; 320 pages; 2010.

Since the 1990s China has undergone rapid economic development. It's no exaggeration to say that practically every useful item that we buy in the West -- for example, shoes, t-shirts, laptops and mobile phones -- was made in a factory somewhere in China. But what of the people who work in those factories? What sort of lives do they lead? How is China's rise to power affecting them?

Leslie T. Chang, a Chinese American, wrote Factory Girls as a means of exploring these very questions. She says she didn't want to write about the harsh conditions in the factories, because that had already been done. Instead, she wanted to concentrate on the workers and tell their stories.

Over the course of two years she follows two young women, Min and Chungming, who leave their rural villages -- what is known as "going out" -- in pursuit of a better life earning a regular wage in a factory. In China, these young women (and men) are "rural migrants". There are 130 million of them (one-third of which are female), representing "the largest migration in human history, three times the number of people who emigrated to America from Europe over a century".

Chang says she specifically wanted the book to focus on women, because they "seemed to have the most to gain in leaving the village but also maybe the most to lose".

Dongguan, in the south-west, was the logical place to start. It is one of the largest factory cities in China, with a population of almost 7 million people, 2 million of them rural migrants. Some 70 per cent of the workforce is female.

What Chang discovered was surprising. While I won't go into specific details about Min and Chungming -- you need to read the book to discover their ups, downs, successes, failures, and the corruption and dangers to which they are exposed, all of which is gripping stuff -- in general the women did not see factory work as we in the West might view it. They saw it as an opportunity to better themselves, to escape their rural lives and to achieve some measure of career success.

They also enjoyed a more fluid job situation than their male counterparts, and were often promoted more quickly. They were more flexible, in terms of fitting in, because they "quickly adopted the clothes, hairstyles and accents of the city".

But if you are female, rural migration is a double-edged sword:

If migration liberated young women from the village, it also dropped them in a no-man's land. Most girls in the countryside were married by their early twenties, and a migrant woman who postponed marriage risked closing off that possibility for good. [...] Social mobility complicated the search for a husband. Women who had moved up from the assembly line disdained the men back in the village, but city men looked down on them in turn.

Despite Chang's insistence that she didn't want to write a book looking at factory conditions, she does provide some interesting pen-portraits of what it is like to work in these places. I found it eye-opening: the factory, no matter what it produces, is pretty much a way of life. Employees sleep in factory dorms, eat in factory cafeterias, are treated in factory hospitals. One factory that Chang visits employees 70,000 people!

Typically, the pay is usually low and the working hours extreme. Privacy is non-existent, as this excerpt describing one of Chang's visits, explains:

Girls stand in doorways combing their shampooed hair in hand mirrors; girls in shorts and flip-flops lug buckets of water to mop the dormitory floors. Residents of the upper floors lean on bare arms over balcony railings, checking out the goings-on at ground level and calling out to friends many stories below. A pop ballad blasts from a tape deck into the muggy morning. I love you, loving you, as a mouse loves rice. The air smells of laundry hanging out to dry; bleach, detergent, and damp are the perpetual scents of the Yue Yuen factory.

Interestingly, migration, once a last resort, has now become an acceptable, indeed desirable, route to a better life. Chang says today's migrants are "younger and better educated than their predecessors" and that "they are driven out less by the poverty of the countryside than by the opportunity of the city".

One of the girls she follows, Min, is able to support herself and her family in the countryside, buying them new things -- a TV, furniture and so on -- and upgrading their lifestyle in the process. It's not uncommon for young rural migrants who work hard to buy their parents a bigger, better, more modern house or apartment.

But Factory Girls isn't just a book about modern China. Chang includes a dual narrative that gives a nod to the past. This narrative focuses on her own Chinese roots, in which she returns to her ancestral village and learns about her family, particularly her grandfather who was assassinated after World War Two. This adds an extra dimension to what is already a superb journalistic endeavour.

This is a book that puts a human face to China's ongoing economic development, but ultimately the book works because these are human stories that transcend time and place. And you don't even have to be remotely interested in China to appreciate Chang's effortless and engaging writing style. Highly recommended.

'My Name is Number 4' by Ting-Xing Ye

Non-fiction - Kindle Edition; Doubleday Canada; 240 pages; 2010.

Ting-Xing Ye is a Chinese-Canadian author, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. My Name is Number 4, first published in 1997, is her heart-rending account of what it was like living in that country during that time.

In China, number 4 is regarded as an unlucky number (similar to the way we in the West regard 13), and for Ting-Xing Ye it could not be more true. Born in Shanghai in 1952, she was the fourth child (out of 5) and by the time she was in her early teens both her parents had died. She and her siblings -- two elder brothers, and an older and younger sister -- were then raised by her Great Aunt.

Unfortunately, because her father was a factory owner, all the children were branded as "capitalists" when the Red Guards took over. This meant much humiliation at school, where she was subject to verbal and physical abuse.

But what terrified me most was a new government policy, supposedly designed to relieve the pressure of overpopulation in the cities. One child from each family must move to the countryside and remain there for the rest of his or her life.

Ting-Xing does the honourable thing and volunteers to move to the country, even though her elder sister was technically the sibling who should have gone. Ting-Xing was given two choices: a rubber plantation on Hainan Island in the South China Sea, or to a prison farm, far north of Shanghai in Jiangsu Province. After her brother did some investigating and discovered that the rubber plantation was plagued by a "devastating outbreak of hepatitis", she chose the prison farm.

For the next six years, Ting-Xing lived and worked on the farm, which "had been set up in the early 1950s to put away political prisoners" but now housed other criminals, all male, whom had been charged with living "dissolute lifestyles". This presented Ting-Xing and her female companions with another threat -- sexual predation -- while trying to cope with a new life of hard work, humiliation and separation from friends and family.

Ting-Xing's account never wallows in self-pity, but she makes it clear that her deprivations were harsh and that she was, at times, subject to what we today know better as "sleep-deprivation torture used by many countries in espionage and war".

She makes few friends and spends what little free time she has teaching herself English, which pays off in the end, when, aged 22, she passed the entrance exam to Beijing University.

Sadly, the Kindle edition of this book seems to be missing the section I was most interested in: Xing-Ting's life post-prison. I wanted to learn of her life as a translator, her feudal-style marriage and later of her defection to Canada, where she married a Canadian and lives to this day. It was only upon reading the fine print, on the second-to-last page, that I realised this is an abridged edition designed for young adult readers -- which may partly explain the over-emphasis on menstruation throughout the book (teenage girls love that sort of thing) and the patronising glossary at the back explaining about the PLA, Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four.

Despite this, My Name is Number 4 is a good read in the sense that you really get a feel for what it must have been like to live a life of fear, deprivation and exile all in the name of Mao's Cultural Revolution. Xing-Ting Ye has an important story to tell, and she tells it well. It's just a pity that this edition wasn't the one I expected, but that's more the fault of the marketing than the author. I reckon teenage girls would love it.