Customer Reviews

Summer of Betrayal

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Under the umbrella of political repression and the bloody crack down of Tianammen Square comes the sexual awakening of a young woman struggling against the misogynistic society and attitudes she despises. This is an extremely honest, open and sensual book, thankfully devoid of vulgarity or gratuitous sexual content. As Deng Xiao Ping's troops marched literally through the student demonstrators and subsequently imposed martial law in the insuing months, the heroine, poet Lin Ying flees along with her collegues, although her feeling of isolation persist. This is emphasised by Lin's discovery of her lover in the arms of his estranged wife whom he claims to be divorcing. Lin Ying then sets about her own life and choices made free of guilt or the binds of a jealous, possesive partner. At times her actions and thoughts come across as self indulgent to the point of being irritating. But to judge would be to miss the point entirely. The self discovery that occurs culminates with the assertion that whilst you can imprison the body, the mind and soul will always remain free.

A colleague urges Lin Ying to move abroad with her, stating; "You could write your poetry abroad. At least if you wanted to you could: freedom is a precious thing." To which she replies; "Here (in China) there are people listening, but one can't speak. There one can speak, but nobody listens," -a truly damning indictment of western values and apathy as much as it is against China's supression of its own people's thoughts and ideas.

The climactic ending is one not to be missed, where whilst not every reader will enojoy it, it is unlikely to be equalled in its open or unapologetic sensuality.

This is a well-written and meaningful novel. It is primarily about the experience of a woman, much more than it is about the experience of being in 1989 Beijing. The poet Lin Ying's journey is a series of painful disillusionments that many readers will readily identify with. The manner in which she gains strength and ultimately transcends the bleak world around her may be incomprehensible to some men and objectionable to some women, but will be powerful to the sensitive reader. Admittedly, Lin Ying's view of her world is unfamiliar to me as a man - which is the primary reason I found this book to be so worthwhile.

Hong Ying's novel should be a must read for anyone interested not just in 'what happened' in Beijing in 1989 but more importantly why 'nothing much' has happened in the twelve years since then. Ying's book is, I think, an accurate account of how a certain class of students and intellectuals saw themselves: as both heroic dare-devils willing to put all on the line and as alienated individualists. In short, they were as much about playing out roles of the alienated 'artist' as they were about bringing change to China - a big reason why peasants never supported these urban rebels. As another reviewer mentioned, getting naked at a party, having sex with several men in unison, and then getting arrested does not a rebel make. Ying's characters make sense when we consider what urban China has become today: a place where money matters more than student rebels, and where yesterday's rebels have made their actions in the summer of 1989 the basis for careers in Western countries playing the role of Chinese student heroes while forever fighting amongst themselves about who was more heroic in May-June 1989 (sounds a lot like how Chinese Communist Party cadres used to act). I would recommend reading Ying's novel in tandem with David Kwan's *Broken Portraits*, an account of Kwan's students who took part in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations.The difference is that Kwan describes real heroes: simple kids who had longings they could not necessarily describe related to a desire to, in the words of one of his students, 'live'.

I loved this book, just like I loved Hong Ying's other novels. What was 1989 about? Read "Summer of Betrayal", and if you don't get it, and you still want to know, read "Daughter of the River". It is Hong Ying's autobiography, written a few years later than "Summer". Still, "Summer of Betrayal" is like an echo of "Daughter of the River". "Daughter of the River" is about growing up in Chongqing, a city of extremes. It is a voice from the labourers who didn't profit by the so-called Communist revolution. You learn about what happened in the 50s, and before. You learn about the famine. You learn about the 60s and 70s. Cannibalism. Boys executed for homosexuality. Civil war. "Summer of Betrayal" is beautiful and terrible. It doesn't care what you think. The same goes for every novel by Hong Ying. 1989 was about everything that happened since the 30s, at least. Nobody seems to have said that clearly. How do you talk about China in a way that avoids cliche? To read Hong Ying is to listen to voices that have always been there, only they are not what you've been told. You start thinking of the past. What happened? Not 1989, but 1937, for example? Read "K", it has just come out in English, ... "K" and "Daughter of the River" are available in every bookstore in China. They are not about 1989. But they are about everything that led up to it. Sexual pretense is part of the face of China, or of any country, that doesn't want you to remember, to ask your parents, to keep asking what happened. Hong Ying's books are beautiful, and terrible. Look for the short stories, too. One is about an old Chinese opera and a modern French writer who taught in Nanjing in the 1960s, when De Gaulle had taken up diplomatic relations with the PRC. In today's Paris, a Chinese man tries to meet this writer, and to remember what happened there at the university. Paris becomes Nanjing. But it is harder to meet again the person that he was. Do you know what I mean? It is terrible. And you know that these things have happened. Hong Ying always takes her stories from real events. There is one about a Chinese-English Red Guard who blows himself up with a house full of hippies in London. It is a true story. Hong Ying got a prize for it in England. "Summer of Betrayal" is a good way to start reading Hong Ying. There have to be people who don't understand her. I wonder what people seek for in literature. There have been few books, in any language, about any topic, that have moved me like Hong Ying's.

An intriguing story of self-discovery, sexuality, and individualism unfolds in communist China with the 1989 incident in Tiananmen Square as a backdrop. Using emotion to describe an artists conflict between freedom/expression to a control exerting government, Ying Hong highlights human determination and spirit in the face of adversity. This is a wonderful and exciting book, and one I found difficult to put down.

I didn't really understand this novel. It begins with a dramatic description of a young woman's escape from Tiananmen Square on June 4th, which is dramatic, but then it degenerates into a (tedious) meditation on women and sex. If there was some kind of parallel drawn between the momentous political events and this woman's personal protest against repression, it would be better. But it is too disjointed and never brings the two together. Skip it unless you can get it cheap. Only takes a couple of hours to read.

The idea and promise of this book are intriguing but the book is a huge disappointment. The writing is disjoined. The focus of the story seems mis-placed with emphasis on portions of this characters experience that detract from readers ability to find the main character compelling. While the book has a strong beginning - it quickly loses itself in over-blown descriptions of situations and characters that are unimportant to the development of the main character. I don't recommend this book.

This book does not focus on the June 4th incident, but rather a woman's jouney through the Chinese underground. In both respects, it fails miserably. Chinese writers should not try to emulate an established American form (the novel is a mixture of harlequin romance and feminist melodrama), but instead venture to new territories. This book is both pretentious and treacerously unoriginal. If you're looking for a good Chinese fiction, skip performance artists like Amy Tan and Hong Ying, and read the short stories of Ha Jin or the novels of Gish Jen.

How do I describe this book? Let me try. First of all: it's bad. The style is rudimentary and unaccomplished. Second, it's shallow. Makes a very very very great effort to tell us how BAD it is to live in an awful country where you just can't be a poet or express who you are - but don't worry, an orgy on the floor of an enlightened youth's house will give the poor confused heroine the freedom she was so desperately looking for. Doesn't look exactly like freedom of the mind, though. The problem with this sort of cheap political pamphleteering unsuccessfully disguised as a novel, is that for some reason it gets lots of undeserved praise (one suspects that some readers and critics are more interested in thrashing a political regime they don't agree with, than in judging whether the book is good or bad), thus obscuring other books which are much better written but, alas, much less sensationalist. My advice? DON'T BUY IT, UNLESS FOR AN ENEMY.

I found this book to be pretentious and badly written. The author sure tries hard to make some sort of (political) statement throughout the novel, but the formula she employs (good, smart young girl trying to be a writer in a nasty Communist country) is nauseating besides hackneyed. Also, would someone please explain to me how exactly dancing naked at a party, having sex with several men on the floor, and getting arrested for it, amounts to "fighting for intellectual freedom"? Because I didn't quite catch the relationship between the two things.