Three Brothers, by Yan Lianke, translated by Carlos Rojas. Text. $32.99.
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The Bushells taste test should be applied to any saga of Chinese family life. Is it as good as Wild Swans?
Jung Chang's account of the travails of three generations of women - her grandmother, mother and herself - remains rightly popular. Although the narrative in Wild Swans is more dramatic and gripping than Three Brothers, Yan Lianke's story is told with grace, irony, wisdom and empathy hard to find elsewhere.
Yan Lianke published his first story in 1979, has written more than five million characters, and enjoys an emphatically positive critical reaction to his books. This family memoir is accessible and poignant enough - and so consistently excellent - to introduce him to a wider readership.
The title of Three Brothers refers to the generation before Yan Lianke's (his father and two uncles), who lived through revolution, famine, a "Great Leap Forward" and the Cultural Revolution.
This story starts with a thoughtful meditation on the author's own ties to his land and village. Yan Lianke discusses how he has "eaten and drunk my fill from that land", how a village might morph into a bigger, more amorphous entity, and how "accepting fate is the only way of approaching the world".
As for encountering death, the counsel offered here is to "chat and drink tea". In this introduction, then throughout the rest of the book as well, Yan Lianke combines a sceptical, knowing adult gaze with some of the sense of innocence and surprise he felt while first learning about life as a child. In a sense, he is establishing how a sense of place and time past can form part of your soul and spirit.
Three Brothers is suffused with bitter memories of gruelling rural work, here in Song county within Henan province. Yan Lianke concludes that the generation before his "lived like dust in the wind, primarily for the sake of daily necessities".
Surely the same melancholy fate had been reserved for many generations before them? Fourth Uncle was a privileged exception; he wore leather shoes and nylon socks. "Fourth Uncle was the first page of the book I wanted to open."
As for his own generation, Yan Lianke and a mate worked hauling rocks until "as exhausted as sick horses". Two thirds of a jet-black slice of pickled vegetable enabled him to push a cart loaded with those rocks zig-zag up a hill. Yan Lianke later discusses how he worked double shifts of 16 hours for 41 days straight to pay for medicines for family members.
Yan Lianke savagely debunks the conventional tale about the Cultural Revolution, the one which casts as victims urban teenagers obliged to waste years in farm labour. From his perspective, the educated youth were brittle, lazy and spoiled - not benighted nor harassed.
This book serves as the counterpoint to Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Dai Sijie, 2000), a reminiscence of how love and literature kept two bourgeois boys alive in Sichuan during the Cultural Revolution. In Yan Lianke's version, the students evinced "congenital disdain" for the peasants, leading them into "a fundamental inability to understand the land on which they stayed for years".
Turning to his own deep suffering, Yan Lianke begins by devoting only one, quite laconic, paragraph to persecution by the authorities. He was obliged to spend six months writing self-criticisms while lying on his back in pain from spinal arthritis.
Just as much space is accorded to the moment he "stared dumbfounded" at a photograph of Vivien Leigh on a copy of Gone with the Wind. Yan Lianke was fortunate enough to read Margaret Mitchell's novel in three volumes, with a different picture of the star of the film version on each of them.
The essential task in stories about Mao's China, whether fiction or non-fiction, is how to convey the depths of misery suffered. That task is far harder in any book on the Holocaust.
Misery, which did not start with Mao nor quite finish with his death, is here defined as hunger, poverty, oppression, sickness, hard labour and anxiety.
First Uncle travelled for months with his own hand-operated loom to make and sell "foreign" socks. In the 1966 Cold Dew solar term, Yan Lianke's family was robbed of the tiny plot of land where they had toiled for three years removing stones in order to grow a few sweet potatoes.
Father was entrapped in a life of incessant manual work, evoked by Yan Lianke in an under-stated, nostalgic manner I have seen equalled only in Seamus Heaney's poem, "Digging".
As with Heaney, Yan Lianke uses the comparisons with his father to demonstrate that hisown skill, his mission and his passion are all integrated into writing. "Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./I'll dig with it."