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Dec. 1st, 2021 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI'm very bad at not reading books to the end; there are only a few times in my life that I have managed to consciously put a book down Forever because I'm not enjoying it, and I am always quite proud of myself when I do manage to do it. Real winners quit!
On the other hand, occasionally it turns out that reading a book I'm not enjoying all the way to the end does have its rewards; this turned out to be the case with Peach Blossom Paradise, a reading experience I was really struggling with until the last like 50 pages or so and then ended up very glad to read those 50 pages.
Peach Blossom Paradise was published in China in 2004 to great acclaim and has just come out here in translation; it's set in China at the turn of the twentieth century, and focuses on Xiumi, the young daughter of a wealthy landowner. Over the course of her life, Xiumi gets caught up in a series of small revolutions that (to my understanding, though I know I'm missing a bunch of what this book is doing by not knowing the history of the period well enough) parallel but do not in fact match up with real historical events, first as a pawn and then as a protagonist -- although protagonist is maybe not the right word, because at that point in the story the POV switches, and Xiumi's attempts to bring about a utopia are as mysterious and distant to the young boy narrating the story at that time as those of the adults around her were to Xiumi in the beginning.
Most of this book was, as I have said, a struggle for me, in large part because it has been a long, long time since I read a book in which sexual threat was such a constant, oppressive presence as it is here. Adolescent Xiumi's introduction to revolution comes via her mother's lover, who is creepy about Xiumi in a way that she finds both flattering and viscerally uncomfortable; he dies before anything can happen, but leaves behind a diary in which he records both his revolutionary activities and his Xiumi-related fantasies. Xiumi is later kidnapped and raped by bandits from a failed Utopian commune, which crystallizes her own determination to believe she can do it better (she is wrong). Next, after a timeskip, the POV shifts to a teen boy in Xiumi's family's household, who is himself sexually preyed on by an older woman as part of her efforts to save her own skin amongst the chaos, in a way that's just as confusing and flattering/frightening for him and skin-crawling for me-the-reader as the revolutionary creeping on Xiumi in the first section was ... so at least it's equal opportunity ... but still not pleasant to read ...
On the other hand! all that makes the sense of safety, comfort and connection that Xiumi finds with other women in several key moments throughout the text all the more visceral by comparison. There's a very real sense in which Xiumi's happiest time in the book is during a kidnapped-by-bandits period, because she gets to hang out alone on an island with an also-kidnapped nun that Xiumi just digs very much and would love to hang out with forever. The last section of the book finds an older Xiumi more or less alone with Magpie, one of the family's maidservants/concubines, and it's very quiet and I liked it very much. "True happiness is to be found in retiring from the world and the struggle to a life of quiet domesticity" is an ending that usually doesn't work for me and is also a vast oversimplification of what this very complex book is doing, but the drastic pivot from the deliberately opaque and bloody confusion of the various attempts that Xiumi encounters -- and participates in -- to impose an ideal on a world that's the wrong shape for it was actually really effective for me.
On the other hand, occasionally it turns out that reading a book I'm not enjoying all the way to the end does have its rewards; this turned out to be the case with Peach Blossom Paradise, a reading experience I was really struggling with until the last like 50 pages or so and then ended up very glad to read those 50 pages.
Peach Blossom Paradise was published in China in 2004 to great acclaim and has just come out here in translation; it's set in China at the turn of the twentieth century, and focuses on Xiumi, the young daughter of a wealthy landowner. Over the course of her life, Xiumi gets caught up in a series of small revolutions that (to my understanding, though I know I'm missing a bunch of what this book is doing by not knowing the history of the period well enough) parallel but do not in fact match up with real historical events, first as a pawn and then as a protagonist -- although protagonist is maybe not the right word, because at that point in the story the POV switches, and Xiumi's attempts to bring about a utopia are as mysterious and distant to the young boy narrating the story at that time as those of the adults around her were to Xiumi in the beginning.
Most of this book was, as I have said, a struggle for me, in large part because it has been a long, long time since I read a book in which sexual threat was such a constant, oppressive presence as it is here. Adolescent Xiumi's introduction to revolution comes via her mother's lover, who is creepy about Xiumi in a way that she finds both flattering and viscerally uncomfortable; he dies before anything can happen, but leaves behind a diary in which he records both his revolutionary activities and his Xiumi-related fantasies. Xiumi is later kidnapped and raped by bandits from a failed Utopian commune, which crystallizes her own determination to believe she can do it better (she is wrong). Next, after a timeskip, the POV shifts to a teen boy in Xiumi's family's household, who is himself sexually preyed on by an older woman as part of her efforts to save her own skin amongst the chaos, in a way that's just as confusing and flattering/frightening for him and skin-crawling for me-the-reader as the revolutionary creeping on Xiumi in the first section was ... so at least it's equal opportunity ... but still not pleasant to read ...
On the other hand! all that makes the sense of safety, comfort and connection that Xiumi finds with other women in several key moments throughout the text all the more visceral by comparison. There's a very real sense in which Xiumi's happiest time in the book is during a kidnapped-by-bandits period, because she gets to hang out alone on an island with an also-kidnapped nun that Xiumi just digs very much and would love to hang out with forever. The last section of the book finds an older Xiumi more or less alone with Magpie, one of the family's maidservants/concubines, and it's very quiet and I liked it very much. "True happiness is to be found in retiring from the world and the struggle to a life of quiet domesticity" is an ending that usually doesn't work for me and is also a vast oversimplification of what this very complex book is doing, but the drastic pivot from the deliberately opaque and bloody confusion of the various attempts that Xiumi encounters -- and participates in -- to impose an ideal on a world that's the wrong shape for it was actually really effective for me.
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Date: 2021-12-02 07:52 am (UTC)I'm really glad the contrast works.
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Date: 2021-12-03 05:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-02 12:30 pm (UTC)One book I found interesting to read shortly after/in comparison with this one, which is also about a female revolutionary and is rooted in parallels to real events, is Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were.
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Date: 2021-12-03 05:08 am (UTC)I fully believed all the footnotes, and then I looked up a review that commented on the intricately woven alternate history of the footnotes and I did a full doubletake. Could've told me anything and I would have believed it, Ge Fei!
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Date: 2021-12-04 01:03 am (UTC)I'm glad you liked it, then!!!
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Date: 2021-12-03 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-03 05:16 am (UTC)