The Colonel and the Eunuch
Mai Jia is China’s best-selling author, whose books have sold over 10 million copies. So what is it that the Chinese read, and how do they view their history?
The Colonel and the Eunuch defies all our rules of story structure. The central character is known variously as the Colonel and the Eunuch. Indeed, few characters are known by their actual names but by their nicknames or family relationship. Unlike the biofics we are familiar with, the book is not written from the point of view of the central character but narrated in Parts 1 and 2 by a teenage boy living in the same rural village in south China in the 1960s. ‘The Colonel’ is reputed to have been a senior officer in both the Nationalist and Communist armies in China’s various wars and an eminent surgeon. He generates a swirl of gossip and myth which fascinates the narrator as he tries to piece together a coherent story. And why is he called The Eunuch?
The Red Guards arrive spreading the Cultural Revolution, the Colonel is disgraced, flees, is betrayed by the narrator’s grandfather and taken away to be re-educated.
Part 3 takes up the story after an interlude of 21 years, when the narrator returns from Europe where he was trafficked to escape his family’s shame. This is a more straightforward, less oblique narrative carrying the life histories of both the Colonel and the narrator up to 2014. As the narrator reflects, ‘life is never simply a tragedy or a farce or a romance – it has all of these, one after the other.’ This is very true of the book, which veers sharply between heart-warming and desolating. A beautiful book written by a Chinese author for Chinese readers, giving outsiders a unique insight into China’s fast-changing culture.
