The Drink and Dream Tea House: A Novel [Hardcover]

Justin Hill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2001

From a spellbinding storyteller comes a highly original, inventive novel that transports us to another world. In the small Chinese town of Shaoyang, times are changing rapidly, and the villagers are struggling to keep up with a China that has transformed radically not only since 1949 but since 1989 and the turbulent days of the protests of Tiananmen Square. The colorful array of characters in this touching, funny and memorable novel come from various generations and all corners of the village -- like Madame Fan, who sings opera from her balcony each morning and is trying to marry off her young daughter Peach, and Da Shan, who has returned home with newfound wealth from the big city to a town he no longer recognizes. Justin Hill has written a beautiful, utterly memorable, and tender story about the clash of the old world and the new.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hill's experiences teaching English in Hunan Province gave rise to this novel (much anticipated in Britain) tracing the lives of several families in the small town of Shaoyang. In Hill's China, the past is ever close behind, and modernity mingles uneasily with ancient custom: waitresses in traditional dress serve traditional food in a karaoke bar with a wide-screen TV, and a video store sits next to a rice stall. Three generations of Shaoyang residents are tugged at by the disparate ideologies of their times, from the nationalism of Chiang Kai-shek and the communism of Mao Zedong to the idealism of Tiananmen Square and the open market economics of Deng Xiaoping. Da Shan, the prodigal son who returns as a successful businessman, rejects both his parents' Communist beliefs and his own revolutionary past; Liu Bei, the girlfriend he deserted, has turned from protesting to prostitution to support her young son; petulant young Peach, whose flirtation with a local boy snowballs out of her control, sings American pop songs as an antidote to her mother's operatic tastes. Parental meddling in the lives of the younger generation provides a measure of wry humor, but the general outlook is grim: political and familial betrayals are ubiquitous. If Hill's characters lean toward archetypes, they are unusual and well-detailed ones, and the slightly distanced stance of the narrative seems appropriate for an Englishman writing about China. His voice is tender and wise beyond his years. While the ending is uncharacteristically neat, the novel as a whole is governed by a more complex sense of the future: "If they were both in a story, then there would be a happy ending... but only in stories." Rights sold in France, Germany, Holland and Italy.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Hill's evocative first novel is set in the contemporary rural Chinese town of Shaoyang, where national and international events take place offstage but have a trickle-down effect. The story begins with rumors that the local factory is closing, which leads to unstable behavior, including the suicide of a revered Communist Party official whose flat had recently been hung with anti-Party banners. The action expands outward, much as gossip spreads, until it involves the entire community, including stalwarts like Old Dzu, eccentrics like Madame Fan (the Opera Lady), and returnees from the city, such as the curious Da Shan. Hill's thoroughly developed characters come to life in an equally well-realized setting, as the author uses wit and great powers of observation to render both the weird and the mundane. Recommended for larger fiction collections. Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (November 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316824003
• ISBN-13: 978-0316824002
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,426,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A novel of contemporary Chinese life, written by a westerner, January 14, 2002

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Drink and Dream Tea House: A Novel (Hardcover)

Set in the present day in mainland China, this first novel is charming, warmly humorous, and often touching in its focus on several families in the small town of Shaoyang as they weather the cultural turmoil which is taking place. The goals of the young have changed, and many people in the cities are experimenting with capitalism. The firebrands of the past are now elderly people living simple, often deprived, lives, and the destruction which occurred during the Cultural Revolution is now recognized and acknowledged as unfortunate. People are coping with the closure of factories, general unemployment, unsatisfying work on farms, and the pollution of rivers and waterways.

Hill endows what might have been a bleak setting with much humor. When Da Shan returns to the town after being away for seven years, for example, his reunion with his mother reflects the relationships of mothers and sons across all cultures and time, sounding as much like a Borscht Belt Jewish Mother skit as a domestic interchange in rural China. The petty quarrels, jealousies, resentments, longings, and hopes for the future, which are only hinted at in Chinese-written books such as Wild Swans, Waiting, and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, are explicit here, further adding to the sense of common humanity which makes Hill's characters so understandable. While this may make the novel "less Chinese," it allows for greater reader identification.

Much of Hill's effectiveness stems from his selection of powerful visual details, rather than his use of pretty words. The polluted river, for example, shines with "pale gray smudges where plastic bags have drowned," while an ancient temple is inhabited by nuns who can no longer read some of the Chinese characters in their books. I did find several fairly explicit sex scenes to be jarring, out of character with the warmth, light humor, and restraint throughout much of the book, and inconsistent with its formal, almost operatic structure. In addition, a harshness creeps into the end of the book and may be a warning to the reader that nothing may be taken for granted in this country, despite our desire to think the people are "just like us." Hill's ambitious novel contains many delights and augurs a promising future. Mary Whipple

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars OUTSTANDING, July 23, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Drink and Dream Tea House: A Novel (Hardcover)

Justin Hill manages to accomplish in 200 pages what takes most writers twice as long... The depth of empathy we feel for Peach's confusion is matched only by our own confusion over her her actions - His characters become such a temporary part of one's existence that, much like life, one finds themselves disappointed, almost angered when they don't act the ways in which you have come to expect.

In addition to the extraordinary character development, the depth of detail Justin Hill has reached with his descriptions of the culture and world in which these characters exist goes far beyond your typical novel. It was not a surprise to find that his other two works were ones of non-fiction - his attention to detail and ability to accurately capture an entire age were so great. I was so taken by Drink and Dream I immediately read his subsequent release, Ciao Asmara, and and the character that IS Eritrea proved to be as captivating as sum total of the characters of Drink and Dream... The drama and suspense painted within the fiction of Drink and Dream is matched by the painfully beautiful depiction of the harsh realities of the struggling country. I recommend both wholeheartedly and am looking forwrad to more.

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, February 27, 2002

By 

"bookscase" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Drink and Dream Tea House: A Novel (Hardcover)

In many instances, I felt the author was distanced from his characters, leaving them less devloped than the reader appreciated. We never quite sympathised as fully as we might have with Peach, for all her adolescent confusion, nor are we allowed to realize fully the horror of the almost comic-caricature ending Hill gives her boyfriend & his sister.
Da Shan bounces around like a noodle in a bowl of soup -- the person who reunites with his son at the end spend most of the novel incongruously drunk or throwing his capitalist money around to impress his parents. His father, and Peach's mother were, in my opinion, the most interesting characters.
By the end, I was still very uncomfotable, as I suppose many Chinese are, with the attempts to reconcile the past with the present, and possibly the future of the country.
The repeated use of the name 'Rocket Factory' made me feel as if I were somewhere missing in the action of reality.
Fat Pan & Lieu Bei were also characters that left this reader feeling frustrated, as if they had more to say and do but were somehow aborted in their actions.