Thorough and thought-provoking.
Seven interconnected stories chronicle the multifaceted, often ugly life of the 21st-century Chinese immigrant.
Wang Ping begins her inquiry into the Chinese immigration experience on the mainland—specifically, in a Navy compound of family apartments on the East China Sea, where the only thing that a pair of sisters has in common is their desire to eventually have a bed to themselves. In the first story, “Where the Poppies Blow,” the plain, practical narrator grows a secret garden in the yard of the wealthy admiral, whose twin daughters have befriended the narrator’s charming younger sister. But in the following story, “Crush,” which presumably features the same pair of sisters, the narrator gets the upper hand. The family shelters a neighboring family from an onslaught of bullets. While the sister tries to charm the handsome neighbor boy, he is interested only in the narrator and her storytelling abilities. The sisters foreshadow Wan Li and Jeanne Shin, characters in two later stories, which take place after the women have immigrated to New York. In the title story, Wan Li is a prudent student who flits between rat-infested apartments in Flushing and Chinatown, working in restaurants while attending school. Though she improbably hooks rich, handsome Chinese playboy Peng, Wan Li doesn’t give in to the temptations of the capitalist West until she finds herself at the mercy of her mysteriously generous landlord, Genji. Meanwhile, Wan Li’s classmate, Jeanne, who narrates “Forage,” finds money and possessions all too alluring, and uses her body to attract the likes of Tiger (also the narrator of “House of Anything You Wish”), who mourns the wife and son he lost to a white man. Though well linked, the seven stories function independently, which not only speaks to the author’s narrative abilities, but also serves as a poignant metaphor for the splintered community she describes.
Thorough and thought-provoking.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-56689-195-7
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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