(no subject)

[skygiants]

Bette Bao Lord's autobiographical kid's novel In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson is one of the few books I still have from my childhood that is not some variant on YA fantasy. Aside from being realistic fiction, it was also *gasp* sports-related fiction, which I generally strenuously avoided, so I'm not quite sure how it made its way onto my bookshelf. But I am glad it did! Not just because I enjoyed it at the time and have fond memories of it (though I have no idea how it would hold up - possibly I should reread it one of these days) but because it meant that when I was wandering through a book fair and found Legacies: A Chinese-American Mosaic, by the same author, I went my childhood! and picked it up. Which is maybe not the best reason to pick up a collection of oral narratives from the Cultural Revolution, but there you go.

Legacies is also partially autobiographical, although that's about where the resemblance to In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson ends. Bette Bao Lord was bon in China and immigrated to the US when she was eight; she was later able to return with her husband, who happened to be an Ambassador to China, and was there in 1989 during the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. During that time, she collected narratives about the Cultural Revolution from everyone she could - long-lost relatives, guests at the embassy, friends of friends - and eventually turned them into this book, interspersed with her own story and attempts to grapple with what had happened in China and what was happening at that time.

Lord is very aware throughout the book that she's coming to these stories from a position of privilege as a successful novelist and the wife of the American ambassador. She self-acknowledges that she has a fairly Americanized perspective, and her feelings about her own immigrant experience are relatively positive ones. In some ways that makes her as a narrator very - comfortable, I think, is the word I want, for an American audience, and I'm not necessarily sure that's always a good thing. Which is not to say she's a bad narrator, because she isn't at all. Her writing is intelligent, at times funny, and she lets the stories of other people speak for themselves.

Some things I took especial note of, in no particular order:
- the man who told the story of his attempted escape to Korea and subsequent imprisonment in the vein of black comedy ("note, in any good farce, the main character never gets any wiser. Note, he must be caught in desperate situations, and these must follow in rapid succession, one scene after another. Otherwise the audience might mistake the tale for a tragedy")
- Bette Bao Lord talking about hearing the story of her grandmother, who walked out on her grandfather when he decided to take a second wife - "I gave Grandmother a rousing cheer," she says, which is then followed up by her entire extended family explaining why this was a stupid move
- the story of the man who was one of only two people, Bao Lord says, who admitted to her that he actually participated in beatings while in the Red Guard

These were not the harshest stories, but they were some of the ones that stuck the most.

Comments

[campkilkare]

I am really surprised she met two; the Cultural Revolution is fairly famous for that. Everyone has a story of what was done to them; no one has any stories about what they did to others. It's like a vast cultural unspoken agreement.

[skygiants]

I kind of suspect she might not even have met two if she had not had the huge vast network of connections that being stationed in the embassy gave her. I'm glad she got that story, though.

[ceitfianna]

I adore that YA book so much too and this one sounds interesting.

[skygiants]

I plan to reread it one of these days! Next time I'm home for a weekend maybe I'll pick it up and bring it back with me.

[ceitfianna]

Yes, I have some YA books that I picked up in Lexington that I need to read including one that Gaiman worked on called Interworld.

[skygiants]

I keep seeing that one in bookstores and having NO IDEA what it's about. But I have not yet read Graveyard Book, so that comes first anyway in the list of Neil Gaiman Things I Have Not Yet Read.

[ceitfianna]

I found it cheap so I'll write about it after I read it.

[elspeth-vimes.livejournal.com]

This sounds like something I need.

[skygiants]

I agree with this assessment! I think you would find it pretty fascinating.

[elspeth-vimes.livejournal.com]

It goes on the list!

[skygiants]

On the one hand, infinitely ever-growing lists can be daunting! On the other hand . . . at least you'll never run out of things to read?

[elspeth-vimes.livejournal.com]

The latter would be a catastrophic tragedy indeed! I must be grateful for my daunting list.