Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China [Paperback]

Hualing Nieh (Author), Sau-ling Wong (Afterword)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 1998

   This extraordinary novel tells the story of two women-Mulberry and Peach-who are really one. Mulberry is a young Chinese-American woman who has fled the turmoil of postwar China to settle in the United States. Unable to forget the terrors she has witnessed or to resolve the conflicts between her new life and her old, she copes by developing a second personality: the fearless, tough-talking, sexually uninhibited Peach. While Mulberry clings to her cultural and ethical roots, Peach renounces her past to embrace the American way of life with a vengeance.

   These two women-both in flight-speak to their readers through an innovative narrative structure, combining journal entries, interior dialogue, letters, poetry, and myth. Mulberry's past-mainly her experiences during the Japanese occupation of China and the years of civil war between Communists and Nationalists-haunts the text. Separated from her family, she seeks refuge in the home of wealthy cousins, who try desperately to maintain their rigid traditions as warrign forces close in around Peking and the house is systematically looted. Mulberry escapes downriver in a boat carrying a strange assortiment of refugees. But her escape to Taiwan only brings new terrors: when her new husband is targeted by the police, Mulberry msut go into hiding with him in a tiny attic room. There her young daughterm who cannot remember life "outside", descends into a fantasy world of her own invention and unwittingly ensures her family's doom,

   Mulberry's journal entires alternate with a series of letters from Peach to "the man from the USA immigration service." Peach has embarked on a cross-country journey in flight from possible deportation. Pregnant and penniless, she lives by her wits while taunting her pursuers and ridiculing her alter ego Mulberry, whom she seeks, finally, to conquer.

   In Mulberry and Peach Hualing Nieh offers a rare perspective, through the eyes of a young refugee woman, of the upheavals of contemporary China (where the book was banned upon its first publication in 1976). Through her experimental, highly effective narrative, she also presents an unforgettable portrait of the pain of cultural dislocation and the anguish of psychological disintegration.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her first fiction to be published in the U.S., the director of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program presents a disquieting study of psychological and cultural schizophrenia. Mulberry, a teenager who grows to adulthood in China during the '40s and '50s, develops a wanton alter ego, Peach. Cutting between Mulberry's old journals and letters that Peach, traveling across the U.S., sends to the immigration official investigating her, the novel provocatively juxtaposes events from American history with China's upheavals; modern ways destroy the past, but do not liberate Mulberry from it. The author's insights about guilt and the ways in which we are trapped in our own lives are perceptive and powerfulMulberry, in hiding, tells her daughter that the people at liberty outside "can't go wherever they want to, either . . . . The earth is a huge attic. The huge attic is divided into millions of little attics, just like ours." But with reductive statements at the beginning of each chapter explaining the characters' symbolic roles, wooden dialogue and often flat writing, this novel and its heroine fail to spark the reader's emotions.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Nieh (also known as Hua-ling Nieh Engle) has written many novels and short stories, most untranslated. In this novel, Mulberry and Peach represent the dual aspects of a Chinese woman caught between men and women, Communism and dictatorship, China and the United States, connection and withdrawal, freedom and imprisonment. We follow her for 20 years as she moves from Beijing to Chungking to Taipei and then from the American Midwest to the West. The story ingeniously blends letters to an immigration officer, dream sequences, fairy tales, maps, diagrams, cartoons, and poems. Recommended for libraries wanting a good collection of contemporary Chinese literature. Kitty Chen Dean, Nassau Community. Coll., Garden City, N.Y.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY; 1 edition (March 20, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558611827
• ISBN-13: 978-1558611825
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #709,647 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A neglected bicultural treasure, January 9, 2003

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China (Paperback)

The "Two Women of China" of this novel's subtitle are one and the same: Mulberry is a Chinese woman who has witnessed the major upheavals of twentieth-century China before fleeing to the United States in the 1960s, while the defiant, "Americanized" Peach is her "liberated" alterego borne of a traumatic past.

Nieh presents Mulberry/Peach's story in four sections. In the first part, while China is suffering from the final attacks of the Japanese invaders at the end of World War II, Mulberry is a teenage runaway stranded with other refugees on a boat caught in the rapids of the Yangtse River. A few years later, she is trapped in Peking with her fiance and his dying mother as the Communists surround the city. In the late 1950s, Mulberry is imprisoned in an attic in Taiwan, hiding from the authorities who are seeking her husband on embezzlement charges. And, in the final section, she has emigrated to the United States, where she is being pursued by the INS and haunted by her other identity, Peach.

Mulberry's plight is, at best, bleak, but Nieh manages to balance an astonishing sense of humor with the description of the calamities and isolation faced by her protagonist. Hauntingly written and beautifully translated, the novel can be read on many levels: historical and cultural allegory, political satire, a treatise on the immigrant's schizophrenic experience, a commentary on Eastern and Western sexual mores and gender identity. As a bonus, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong's discerning afterword amplifies these and other themes and provides useful background for understanding the novel, but (fortunately) "Mulberry and Peach" will be immediately accessible to any reader.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a masterpiece, not said lightly, October 24, 2002

By 

Amalie A. Aseltine (Beijing, China) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mulberry and Peach Two Women of China (The Women's Press fiction) (Paperback)

This qualifies as one of the most remarkable novels I have ever read. The title character Peach, in declaring her freedom, careens on as wild and uninhibited a course as any character in literature much in contrast to her meek and terrified now subaltern Mulberry. Try to buy the version which has an afterword by the translator: read this as you're reading the novel as the comments are interesting, informative, and enlightening. The novel's form, its literary roots, its themes all evade any fixed classification--no one can lay claim to any advocacy unless it is on its plea for the individual's integrity in the face of the attempts by societies, historical forces, and governments to quantify and stratify our lives. But even that claim cannot come close to revealing the complexity and exquisite craft of the work itself. Only on a second reading do I start to discover how much a treasure of telling detail "Mulberry and Peach" is. For you analytical types, there are multiple levels of allegory threading through the work. The caveat to "not overinterpret" seems not to apply. Such compelling writing deserves to become better known, more widely read and reread, and extensively broadcast to college literature classes around the world. Let's get it back in print, and then keep it in print. Although I am given to enthusiasms, I'm not given to hyperbole--I say, this is the work of a most masterful author. Please, someone, translate more of her work!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars beautiful, October 9, 2002

By 

Sarah Gregg (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China (Paperback)

Hua-Ling Nieh's writing is tantamount to dreaming a song/story, it does not directly appeal to the senses but rather, enters the reader's mind subconsciously. A fascinating portrayal of a woman surviving post World War II turmoil in China, it blatantly and delicately explores the impact of the cultural, lingual, political, and social upheaval that is part of revolution. Mulberry herself undergoes a complete dissociation of her 'hated', 'weaker' Chinese self and morphs into Peach, the 'liberated', 'strong' American self. A wonderful story of survival, mental illness, and cultural transplantation, something many Americans do not appreciate. Should appeal to anyone interested in Chinese or Chinese/American history, feminism, or mental illness in literature.