Ingratitude: A Novel [Paperback]

Ying Chen (Author), Carol Volk (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520220137 | ISBN-13: 978-0520220133 | Publication Date: October 29, 1999 | Edition: 1

"I was dying to see Mother suffer at the sight of my corpse," announces the young woman at the heart of this powerful and disquieting novel, which has won acclaim in France and in Canada upon original publication in French. In Ingratitude,Ying Chen tells the story of Yan-Zi, who decides to commit suicide in order to escape the yoke of her dominating mother. The narrator's account of her final days recalls the chilling detachment of Camus's The Stranger.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Perhaps one has to come from an intensely traditional society such as the one Chinese author Ying Chen describes in her third novel, Ingratitude, in order to fully empathize with the protagonist's desire to commit suicide solely to condemn her mother to a life of suffering: "I was burning with the desire to see Mother suffer at the sight of my corpse. Suffer to the point of vomiting up her own blood. An inconsolable pain." What, one wonders, has the mother done to deserve such a fate? Her worst sin, it appears, is to never have smiled at her daughter. Yan-Zi, the narrator of this slim volume, speaks to us from beyond the grave. As she witnesses her own funeral preparations and the grief of her family and friends, she looks back over the 25 years that she lived. A critical mother, a distant, unloving father--admittedly, Yan-Zi's childhood was not an especially happy one, but Ying Chen's minimal prose and sparse characterization make it difficult to see just what it was that drove this young woman to such extremes of hatred and revenge she would throw herself under a truck just to get back at her mother.

If Yan-Zi's motives for taking such drastic action remain murky, Ying Chen evokes the particulars of her life with laserlike precision. There are the boyfriends, Hong-qi, Chun, and Bi, the bitter relationship between Yan-Zi's mother and her grandmother, and just a subtle hint of the changing political climate in China: "Your father was such an alert man," Yan-Zi's mother says, discussing the car accident that destroyed her husband's mind; "Who knows whether this accident wasn't an attempted murder! You have to keep your eye on these kids, they're crazy today...." It may be that, in China, Yan-Zi's act of self-annihilation would be viewed as the purest form of rebellion against the traditional expectations placed on women in that country; to a Western reader, however, her complaint that "because of Mother, my life would always be flawed" comes off as adolescent whining. Ingratitude is an apt title for this novel, and one that invites several different interpretations. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Nominated for Canada's Governor General's Award and Prix Femina, the third novel (the first to be published in English) by Chinese-Qu?becois Chen is a first-person narrative from beyond the grave: the tale of a 25-year-old woman from a family of traditional Chinese immigrants who plans to stage her own death in order to make her mother suffer. The daughter loathes her mother for giving her a life she never wanted, then robbing her of the freedom to live it for herself. "The day I was born was already the day I was defeated," Yan-Zi explains. After tormenting Yan-Zi through her childhood by competing with her for the attention of her aloof, ineffectual father, Yan-Zi's mother tries desperately to find her a husband but rejects the man Yan-Zi falls for. Yan-Zi responds to these tyrannies, petty and large, by being "faultless," outwardly worthy of the mother whom she knows she can never please. What redeems this long J'accuse from adolescent fantasy is Yan-Zi's death (which she had planned with sleeping pills but achieves accidentally by running into the path of a truck), and the peculiar afterlife where she learns that "You can't turn away from your mother without turning away from yourself.... Fallen leaves return to their roots... traitors to their mothers will continue to be vagabonds, whether dead or alive." With sure-footed prose and a constant movement toward wisdom, no matter how bitter, Chen restrains her material and lends the work an oddly quiet dignity.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 154 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (October 29, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520220137
• ISBN-13: 978-0520220133
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,733,270 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Well, the title's accurate anyway. . ., January 6, 2010

By 

C. Ackerman (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ingratitude: A Novel (Paperback)

By the end of the first page of this novel, you know that the narrator has recently committed suicide. From there, the story is a series of flashbacks leading up to her death and flash forwards to the funeral and beyond. It's a short novel written in short chapters composed of short sentences (almost devoid of adjectives). It's an example of a Chinese genre of film and fiction in which family members are speechless in their fury with each other for failing to live up to the others' idiosyncratic expectations, usually starting with a parent who feels that their children are their property and shouldn't have minds of their own. (It's not that there's necessarily a higher proportion of Chinese families like this than in any other culture. It's that these have become stock characters in the Chinese media.)

To be honest, I find myself almost completely indifferent this piece. It's competently done, but it doesn't provoke any significant reaction. It's just there. I've known families like this. This does an okay job of describing them. Just okay. And the characters are too mean-spirited to identify with, and there isn't the madness of, say, Dostoevsky's characters, so there's no pull on those fronts. Then from another angle, the prose is too flat to make the style distinctive. Finally, it probably goes without saying that if the narrator starts off dead, there isn't going to be much suspense. In the end, there just isn't anything to justify reading this instead of the tens of thousands of other novels that have been written.

The one interesting passage is as follows:

At least Mother had been gracious to Chun. She could be gracious to everyone except the members of her own family. With them she thought politeness would be hypocritical and beside the point; her severity and slight cruelty were necessary, in fact, and constituted solid proof of her love.

5.0 out of 5 stars Chinese yet un-Chinese handling of the story line,subtle., September 1, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Ingratitude (Hardcover)

Ying Chen writes with restraint and her novel has a strong effect of suffocation. The author is identifiably Chinese in the depiction of the husband and wife relationship, and un-Chinese in its ever so detached manner of description. The novel is very deep and meaning universal. Excellent reading.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars could not put it down, October 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Ingratitude: A Novel (Paperback)

excellent story of control; a mother who has it and a daughter who wants it at any cost even if that price is death.