Customer Reviews

The Drink and Dream Tea House: A Novel

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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

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.

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.