Customer Reviews

Drink and Dream Teahouse

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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