Nothing to My Name
How China has changed in less than a lifetime! This family saga, set in three locations in China between 1948 and 1999, follows the lives of a mother and daughter from when the mother is age 12 until her daughter reaches age 17. Ah Xue (after her marriage we know her as Mimosa) is herself the daughter of an illiterate fisherman’s widow and part-time hairdresser. By the end of the book, her own daughter, Fei, is a physics student at Beijing University.
The story is not narrated chronologically. Initially it is in two timelines, the one beginning in Zhoushan in 1948, in the dying years of the Nationalist regime, and the other in Nanchang in 1989, at the time of the student protest in Tiananmen Square. Even when the timelines merge, there are long stretches of remembered events, filling in gaps in the earlier narrative, so the reader still has to fit together a complex jigsaw. It would also have been useful to have had a map of China with the principal locations.
But even if this makes demands on the reader, the reward is a series of wonderful set pieces, beautiful, inspiring and sometimes horrifying, some specific to the experience of girls and women in later 20th-century China and others reflecting the universal human experience. Confusing but enjoyable.
