World Books Review: Life Under Mao

Bi Feiyu’s satiric novel about village life during the Cultural Revolution is uneven, but he displays an uncanny understanding of young women and the way they use their sexuality to try to take control of their lives.

Three Sisters, by Bi Feiyu, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 279 pages.

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

Here is a novel of the 1970s from a young Chinese writer well known in his country for the screenplay, “Shanghai Triad,” and earlier works of prose, including Moon Opera, which was published in this country last year, as well as other forms of journalism.

On the jacket of this newest work to be translated (very well) into English, this novel is compared to Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Empire of the Sun. Let me say, at the outset, that Three Sisters is simply not in a class with either. Balzac was outstanding because it was buttressed by a love of literature rarely found anywhere as well as a poignant sense of discovery of a larger world, and Ballard’s autobiographical novel is one of the most moving books ever written about a childhood torn to pieces, a tale told with sweeping breadth and compassion.

The Three Sisters is a smaller work, a satire at once charming and exasperating, which circles around its characters in ways so repetitious in the beginning that a Western reader may lose patience. But persevere, because the middle section of the book is the best part and it raises interesting questions about face and shame in its exploration of the relationship between two sisters. And when Bi Feiyu describes the landscape and the cycles of life in the small farming villages as well as the slyness of some of the minor characters, he displays his considerable talent.

The set-up is this: Before the one-child rule was put into rigorous practice, the Wang family, who lives in the country in a small village, has had seven girls. The book begins with the birth of an eighth child, a son; finally, Wang Lianfang can command the respect that goes with his job as a prosperous branch secretary of the party. Soon, though, things begin to go wrong.

Wang’s wife, Shi Guifang, is too tired to care that she has finally produced a male child and decides to reward herself with a life of languor and laziness that doesn’t seem believable anywhere, let alone in Mao’s China. However, her decision may well rest on her resentment over her husband’s voracious sexual appetite; he is the Don Juan of Wang village and almost every woman there has been bedded by him. And when, in quick succession, a barren woman becomes pregnant by him, and he is found in another woman’s bedroom in flagrante delicto, he is removed from his job. And while he is negotiating over a husband for his oldest daughter, Yumi, two of his younger daughters are gang-raped, and the match falls apart.

Author Bi Feiyu: Satiric intentions undercut his latest novel

But far more interesting than this man, who seems to be no more than a cartoon, are the daughters, especially Yumi, the oldest, who gives her name to the first section of the book. She is sturdy, smart (if not as beautiful as her third sister), and she only has contempt for her father’s whores. She takes over the running of the household with incredible ability for a mere 17 year old.

Indeed, Bi Feiyu seems to have an uncanny understanding of young women and the way they use their sexuality to try to take control of their lives. As we watch Yumi maneuver her way through a very short courtship with an aviator (Yes, an aviator! the village almost swoons) we feel only pity and fear for her predicament as she naïvely tries to hold onto what she sees as her trump card. Here are Yumi and her intended during their last encounter:

Peng Guoliang was falling apart. So was Yumi, but she was not going to give in this time, no matter what he said. This stronghold could not be breached. It was her last defense. If she was going to hold on to this man, she needed to keep at least one fire of desire burning in him. Wrapping her arms around his head, she kissed his hair and said, “Don’t hate me, Elder Brother.”

The picture of Wang village is cruel (a combination of Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Connor with none of their subtlety), the villagers a kind of Greek chorus, but not content merely to comment on events. When they start to intervene actively in Yumi’s affairs, she knows she will have to find another solution to the problem of marriage. She is soon married off to a widower much older than she.

In the second section of the book named for the third, very beautiful, and seductive sister, Yuxiu, things grow more interesting. We learn about the gang rape from Yuxiu’s point of view and begin to get a sense of what it meant to live under Mao.

Before eight o’clock in the morning, the main street. . .is, in essence, an open-air market that sends a jumble of smells from one end to the other. But after eight, the street undergoes a transformation, becoming clean and orderly. . .The middle-school PA system crackles to life, heralding a solemn moment: “Beijing time – 8:00 A.M.” Beijing time: distant, intimate, sacred, a symbol of unity, a sign that all Chinese citizens live planned, disciplined lives – not only the residents of Beijing, but everyone in the country.

Three Sisters appears to be a testament to the messiness of the lives in that huge country, a chaos masked by the semblance of order, a vast Potemkin Village. In a way, that is part of the fascination of this book – how entangled and miserable these lives can really become. The author’s satiric intentions fail him. Eventually we are involved in a touching story of Yuxiu’s love affair with a most unsuitable person, and caught up in her sister’s Yumi’s rage when she discovers the truth. The warm, happy household Yumi has created is about to be smashed.

I wish that Bi Feiyu had had the courage to tell us more about these complicated girls in the third section and give us a full-fledged novel, but he switches gears (and loses steam) and plugs in a schoolyard tale about the seventh sister, Yuyang, the most intellectually ambitious of the girls. This section is virtually unconnected to what has happened before, and seems unduly influenced by Muriel Spark (although updated in sexual matters) and doesn’t really deliver all that much punch, satiric or otherwise.

Still, this will be an eye-opening read for anyone curious about the Cultural Revolution, the mores of the families struggling to survive in China’s small villages, and the lives of the seemingly sexless women who labored so stoically in their Mao jackets.

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Roberta Silman is the author of Blood Relations, a story collection, three novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning the World Again, and a children’s book, Somebody Else’s Child. She has recently completed a new novel, Secrets and Shadows. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net