Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin

This novel is based on the diary (and other material) of an American in Nanjing when the Japanese invaded in 1937. Minnie Vautrin is the temporary head of a small Christian college funded by donations from the US. Most of the faculty and students as well as the president have gone elsewhere as it becomes more and more evident Nanjing is going to be attacked.

The story is told from the point-of-view of Anling, who helps Minnie run the school. They make elaborate plans so that the school can be a place for women and children refugees and figure out where they may be able to put 2000 people. The actual invasion is, of course, more chaotic and they end up with more than 10,000 refugees.

This novel is almost like two different stories. The horrors of the attack of Nanjing are detailed. It is a fiction book, but obviously based on historical events. Minnie has to make some terrible decisions and fights to keep the refugees on campus safe. After the fighting is over and the occupation of Nanjing continues, the action slows down dramatically.

It is still challenging as many of the refugees stay. Minnie open a school for them to learn crafts, but a former president, Mrs. Dennison, arrives and wants to return the college to the way it was without really understanding all that happened over the past year. Anling also faces her own problems with a son who was studying in Japan at the time the war broke out and a husband being pressured to join a puppet government.

Here Minnie goes on a short vacation about a year and a half after the initial attack. She’s suffering from depression and the stress of dealing with Mrs. Dennison who wants to get of the rest of the refugees. She comes back to find many gone.

“Minnie rebuked herself for caring too much about her personal feelings and about losing face. How could she let petty personal disputes stand in the way of more important matters, such as saving a woman’s life and protecting the two schools? … She couldn’t escape feeling small-minded. How could she make amends? The more she thought about her faults, the more disappointed she was in herself. ”

Nanjing Requiem is a worthwhile, but difficult, book to read. It is difficult because of the depictions of war and war crimes committed on civilians. It would be really interesting to read Minnie Vautrin’s actual diary, but I don’t think that’s very accessible.

The Mao Case by Qiu Xiaolong

Detective Inspector Chen works in Shanghai in the 1990’s. He gets an assignment to take personal leave, but it is a cover for him to work on a case that Internal Security is also working on. It involves Mao and something he may or may not have left with a dancer during his lifetime. The dancer’s granddaughter has recently come into good fortune and the speculation is that it must be an item from Mao that is behind this. Internal Security is involved in case it is something potentially damaging to Mao’s reputation.

This book, one of a series, by Qui Xiaolong is interesting for many reasons beyond unraveling the mystery. The society is still recovering from the Cultural Revolution. For example, Detective Yu, Chen’s assistant, and his wife, Peiqin are solidly middle class with two stable paying jobs. They live in one room with their son and struggle to make ends meets. Both were impacted by the Cultural Revolution as illustrated by this passage:

“Peiqin had been a straight-A student in elementary school, wearing the Red Scarf of a proud Young Pioneer, dreaming of a rosy future in the golden sunlight of socialist China. Everything changed overnight, however, with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. Her father’s ‘historical problem’ cast a shadow over the whole family.”

Detective Chen is also a poet and a translator of poetry. This case involves examining some of Mao’s poetry. That adds another dimension to this mystery novel. I don’t really know of the tradition behind Chinese poetry or whether Mao’s is any good. Here’s an example of a poem written supposedly for Madame Mao:

“Against the gathering dusk stands a pine, sturdy, erect / in composure with riotous clouds sweeping past. / What a fairy cave it is, born out of the nature! / Ineffable beauty comes at the perilous peak.”

My favorite part of the book is the descriptions of life in Shanghai and Chen’s trip to Beijing. I especially appreciate all the meetings that take place in restaurants and describe the various dishes. I spent some time in Asia and definitely miss the food – hard to get in the middle of Oregon.

Apologies Forthcoming by Xujun Eberlein

I was in a lab in graduate school that had graduate students and post-docs from all over the world. While I was there we had people from China, Germany, Canada, Japan, Holland, Taiwan, Italy, Korea, and the US, and possibly a few other places. After reading Apologies Forthcoming by Xujun Eberlein, I wish I had taken the time to find out more of their background stories and how each person ended up there in that particular lab.

This collection of short stories by Eberlein focuses on China during and after the Cultural Revolution. They are powerful stories. Stories that leave you wondering how a country could put itself back together. It is a very timely release right before the Beijing Olympics when the attention on China is going to be intense. Can you imagine a ten-year period where all the colleges and most high schools in a country were shut down? Educated people were sent to the countryside to be re-educated. Teenagers were separated from their families and sent into the Red Guard or off to the countryside as well.

In a story entitled, “The Randomness of Love”, a seventeen-year-old girl explains why she is in the countryside. “ 'All other countries in the world have population flowing from the countryside to the cities: only China is practicing the opposite. Our population flows from the cities to the countryside. This is a creative revolutionary movement, and its historical significance can never be overestimated.' ” Fast-forward ten years later and this disillusioned woman is having trouble adjusting to her boring job and begins an affair with a married man. And, it seems to me that she is one of the lucky ones, surviving her insertion into the countryside near the end of the Cultural Revolution and making it to college.

Other stories are full of despair. The author draws on some of her own experiences during the Cultural Revolution, including the death of her older sister as a Red Guard. In “Feathers” a ten-year-old girl must pretend that her sister is still alive. She enlists the help of those who live around her so that her grandmother will not know. It seems a horrendous burden on a ten-year-old, yet amongst everything else that is happening you can almost see how a mother would allow it. Almost. The stories are dark, yet they are not without hope and they are definitely worth reading. Eberlein portrays not only the victims, but also those who served in the Red Guard or told on their neighbors. No one can escape being one or the other, or oftentimes both in these kinds of circumstances.

The Cultural Revolution, or rather, what is now known as Ten Disastrous Years, ended in 1976. That means the post-doc and graduate students from China in my lab must have lived through a portion of it. Maybe they lucked out and caught the tail end where they still managed to get a high school education and the tests to get into college were being restarted. Definitely their parents lived through this time. It is interesting to me now that we never discussed this and that to all intents and purposes we adapted to working in the same lab in the US despite our vastly different experiences. Is that the true power of education?

Check out Blog Stop Book Tours for more information on the author and to see what other reviewers have to say about Apologies Forthcoming.