Customer Reviews

Love and Revolution: A Novel About Song Qingling and Sun Yat-sen (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)

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Very cool book. In just 62 chapters Ping Lu presents a history of the first president of China, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. More exactly, in the odd chapters we learn about the last month of the Founding Father of the Republic and how he reflects upon his own life as a failure. The even chapters contain the memoirs of his widow, Song Qingling, the middle of the three Song Sisters, and for a smaller part the reflections of her adopted children, the sisters Yuyu and Zenzen. Actually, Yuyu and Zenzen have never existed. They are adopted by Ping Lu to serve as her virtual eyes, in order to get a glimpse of the private side of love and revolution.

Obviously to avoid future conflicts about their real thoughts, neither Dr Sun nor Madame Song have left a track of written records. As a historian Ping Lu, however, aims to give words to a long silence. As a novelist she invented Yuyu and Zenzen, who contribute a lot to a vivid image of Madame Song. As a combination of fiction and non-fiction this book becomes a tribute to the revolutionaries who have no blood on their hands.
"People would see evidence of his (Dr Sun Yat-sen's) revolutionary and nation-building efforts, but they would also see how the lack of real power left China in a messy predicament."

This book is an eye-opener for the history of modern China. The hardest part for non-chinese readers to understand, however, is the long list of Chinese warlords who had betrayed Dr Sun Yat-sen's ideals. We have no idea who they are and what their power is. Initially, since it is hard to remember all their names, I wished for an appendix where we can read more about these opponents. However, it might have been that Ping Lu's style corroborates with time and history in obliterating all these names, so that we remember only the one that should not be forgotten.

It is interesting that in Dr Sun final memory of the lyrics "everything in the world is but a dream" the curtain rises for his longtime friend, the Japanese revolutionary, Miyazaki Toten. "Thinking of his bearded friend Sun's brows relaxed and happiness suffused him."

Ping Lu is a must-read for the reader interested in modern history of China.