Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Angry view of China in poster colors, August 9, 2005
Many years ago, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, I visited China as part of a delegation from Australia. We saw the official sights and heard the official views, didn't believe a lot of it, but came away impressed with the abilities and intelligence of Chinese people. One of the official events we attended was a performance of "On the Docks", a rare, approved Chinese opera with a modern theme and modern choreography. Even though it was awful in many ways, I still felt attracted to the colors, the movements, and the presentation of mawkishly earnest sentiments (which few might have believed in their hearts). At that very time, millions of Chinese were undergoing "re-education" in the countryside, learning the political lessons to be gained by shoveling manure, eating bad food, and being resented by the actual peasants. The author of this book, Zhu Lin, was one of them.
All the more strange (to my American eyes), then, that when she wrote, she employed a style close to "On the Docks"---bright primary colors, characters without depth, good guys and bad guys. I did not find much psychological finesse here, more melodrama or bathos. To top that off, she wrote of topics that could not have been welcome even in her more liberal times. She criticized Communist party officials bitterly, she criticized the old and the new mercilessly, and then the re-emergence of vendors, salesmen, and all sorts of petty businessmen, creaming profits off pilfered state property. So, though she writes bitter stories of the exploitation of women, injustices everywhere, and officials taking advantage of the simple people they are supposed to serve, she couches these stories in a style that I would have thought now long-abandoned. A puzzling performance. The last story, "Street Sketch", about a Shanghai street con-man is the best, but it ends very strangely, almost as if two disparate themes were welded crudely together. I appreciated these stories as a glimpse of a Chinese writer unknown in the West, but I doubt if they would appeal to many readers. The propaganda poster, the one-dimensional character still reverberate here.
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