Mother's Day, Momhood, & Tan's The Joy Luck Club

This blog has previously recommended several mom-focused novels:

• Grossman's To the End of the Land, 
• Shriver's disturbing We Need to Talk About Kevin, and 
• Donoghue's even more disturbing Room. 

Light-hearted mom novels seem a little hard to come by!

Anyway, for this mother's day my book recommendation is a classic novel about mother-daughter bonding, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club:

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories.

In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable."

Forty years later the stories and history continue. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. 

Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

You might also like the list "The Top Ten Novels about Motherhood" from the Momoir Project blog.

New Bird Flu Virus & Kalla's Pandemic

In the disease category, we've covered smallpox and HIV/AIDS. Now there appears to be a new strain of bird flu -- with no human-to-human transmission yet, thankfully. Here's yesterday's BBC story "China: Four more infected with H7N9 bird flu:"

A further four cases of a bird flu virus not previously seen in humans have been reported by authorities in China. Three women aged 32, 45 and 48, and an 83-year-old man were diagnosed between 19 and 21 March and are critically ill. There have now been seven confirmed cases of the H7N9 virus, the World Health Organization said. Two people have died. But the WHO says there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

For a novel about a worldwide plague of bird flu, try Pandemic by Daniel Kalla:

Right now, in a remote corner of rural China, a farmer and his family are sharing their water supply with their livestock: chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep. They share the same waste-disposal system, too. 

Bird viruses meet their human counterparts in the bloodstreams of the swine, where they mix and mutate before spreading back into the human population. And a new flu is born.... 

Dr. Noah Haldane, of the World Health Organization, knows that humanity is overdue for a new killer flu, like the great influenza pandemic of 1919 that killed more than twenty million people in less than four months. So when a mysterious new strain of flu is reported in the Gansu Province of mainland China, WHO immediately sends a team to investigate. Haldane and his colleagues soon discover that the new disease, dubbed Acute Respiratory Collapse Syndrome, is far more deadly than SARS, killing one in four victims, regardless of their age or health. But even as WHO struggles to contain the outbreak, ARCS is already spreading...

China's Cultural Revolution & Min's Wild Ginger

Since I've previously posted about China's re-education camps, I'm glad a story has come up that allows me to cover the "Cultural Revolution" that spawned them.

 From last week's Guardian article "China's Cultural Revolution: son's guilt over the mother he sent to her death:"

They beat her, bound her and led her from home. She knelt before the crowds as they denounced her. Then they loaded her on to a truck, drove her to the outskirts of town and shot her. 

Fang Zhongmou's execution for political crimes during the Cultural Revolution was commonplace in its brutality but more shocking to outsiders in one regard: her accusers were her husband and their 16-year-old child. 

More than four decades on, Fang's son is seeking to atone by telling her story and calling for the preservation of her grave in their home town of Guzhen, central Anhui province, as a cultural relic. 

Fang's plot is already hemmed in by buildings and a wall is rising behind it. Nearby streets are stacked with window frames, tiles and pallets of wood. Without official recognition, fears Zhang Hongbing, his mother's grave and story could soon be swept away – part of a wider, shadowed past that is fast disappearing.

For a novel set during the Cultural Revolution, try Wild Ginger by Anchee Min:

The beautiful, iron-willed Wild Ginger is only in elementary school when we first meet her, but already she has been singled out by the Red Guards for her "foreign-colored eyes." Her classmate Maple is also a target of persecution. It is through the quieter, more skeptical Maple, a less than ardent Maoist whose father is languishing in prison for a minor crime, that we see this story to its tragic end." The Red Guards have branded Wild Ginger's deceased father a traitor and eventually drive her mother to a gruesome suicide, but she fervently embraces Maoism to save her spirit. She rises quickly through the ranks and is held up as a national model for Maoism. Wild Ginger now has everything, even a young man who vies for her heart. But Mao's prohibition on romantic love places her in an untenable position. Into this sexually charged situation steps Maple, creating an uneasy triangle that Min has portrayed with keen psychological insight and her characteristic gift for lyrical eroticism.

China's Forced Labor Gulags & Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Considering that East Asia has about a quarter of the world's population, we haven't covered it that much lately.  We had a February post about The Orphan Master's Son and North Korea and a post earlier this month about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge.

Well, hopefully we can start to rectify the situation because I finally found an article about China that matches up with a highly-praised novel.

Here's yesterday's BBC article "Reforming China's gulags:"

China's new Premier Li Keqiang has signalled his government is prepared to start the process of reforming the widely-despised system of re-education camps. The camps, a gulag-type network created half a century ago, hold thousands of inmates who are made to undergo "laojiao", also known as "re-education through labour". But the case of one woman, Tang Hui, sent to a camp last year, galvanised public opposition to the system. Reforming it would be a significant legal step... Her ordeal began in 2006 when her 10-year-old daughter disappeared from home. Unbeknown to Tang Hui, the girl had been raped and then lured to a local karaoke centre by a man she'd met. There she was gang raped again by four men, beaten and forced to work as a prostitute. Local police did little to track down the missing girl, saying she'd probably run away from home. Tang Hui didn't give up and, after three months searching her hometown of Yongzhou, discovered where her daughter was being held. Only then did the authorities act, freeing the girl and arresting her captors. Tang Hui campaigned vigorously for the death penalty for the men who did it. But she says the pimps had powerful connections in the police force, and the bad publicity the case brought may have tarnished the careers of local officials. So those same police and officials had Tang Hui sent to Zhuzhou Baimalong camp to undergo 18 months of re-education. She says it was an act of revenge to silence her... Like all of those sent to labour camps Tang Hui went through no legal process. There was just a written order and she was shut away

For a novel about China's forced labor re-education camps, try Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie:

The Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao Zedong altered Chinese history in the 1960s and '70s, forcibly sending hundreds of thousands of Chinese intellectuals to peasant villages for "re-education." This moving, often wrenching short novel by a writer who was himself re-educated in the '70s tells how two young men weather years of banishment, emphasizing the power of literature to free the mind. Sijie's unnamed 17-year-old protagonist and his best friend, Luo, are bourgeois doctors' sons, and so condemned to serve four years in a remote mountain village, carrying pails of excrement daily up a hill. Only their ingenuity helps them to survive.

UPDATE:  here's a longer review of Sijie's novel over at the Book Hooked Blog.