Summer of Betrayal: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: About 1989, but more about the decades leading up to it.
Review: I loved this book, just like I loved Hong Ying's other novels. What was 1989 about? Read "Summer of Betrayal", and if you don't get it, and you still want to know, read "Daughter of the River". It is Hong Ying's autobiography, written a few years later than "Summer". Still, "Summer of Betrayal" is like an echo of "Daughter of the River". "Daughter of the River" is about growing up in Chongqing, a city of extremes. It is a voice from the labourers who didn't profit by the so-called Communist revolution. You learn about what happened in the 50s, and before. You learn about the famine. You learn about the 60s and 70s. Cannibalism. Boys executed for homosexuality. Civil war. "Summer of Betrayal" is beautiful and terrible. It doesn't care what you think. The same goes for every novel by Hong Ying. 1989 was about everything that happened since the 30s, at least. Nobody seems to have said that clearly. How do you talk about China in a way that avoids cliche? To read Hong Ying is to listen to voices that have always been there, only they are not what you've been told. You start thinking of the past. What happened? Not 1989, but 1937, for example? Read "K", it has just come out in English, ... "K" and "Daughter of the River" are available in every bookstore in China. They are not about 1989. But they are about everything that led up to it. Sexual pretense is part of the face of China, or of any country, that doesn't want you to remember, to ask your parents, to keep asking what happened. Hong Ying's books are beautiful, and terrible. Look for the short stories, too. One is about an old Chinese opera and a modern French writer who taught in Nanjing in the 1960s, when De Gaulle had taken up diplomatic relations with the PRC. In today's Paris, a Chinese man tries to meet this writer, and to remember what happened there at the university. Paris becomes Nanjing. But it is harder to meet again the person that he was. Do you know what I mean? It is terrible. And you know that these things have happened. Hong Ying always takes her stories from real events. There is one about a Chinese-English Red Guard who blows himself up with a house full of hippies in London. It is a true story. Hong Ying got a prize for it in England. "Summer of Betrayal" is a good way to start reading Hong Ying. There have to be people who don't understand her. I wonder what people seek for in literature. There have been few books, in any language, about any topic, that have moved me like Hong Ying's.

Rating:
Summary: Painfully pretensious, but could be worse
Review: There has emerged a new genre of Chinese literature which, unfortunately, dominates what gets translated into English. The genre features scenes from post-reform China, through the eyes of a young woman with soaring literary ambitions (but less remarkable talent) who experiments heavily with sex and drugs.

That these books are semi-autobiographical are hyped as their primary selling point. "A young Chinese woman reveals her sexual escapades...!" But the result is a prententious sense of self-importance in the writer/protagonist's narrative, with some two-hundred pages of bombastic navel-staring.

There's so little available in English on contemporary China that such books come as scandalous revelations for Western readers who never imagined that drug use and casual sex present a norm for many young urbanites.

Hong Ying's depiction of a promiscuous aspiring poet's slumming about in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square is saved from pure trashy novel status by it's "historical significance", but that doesn't make it any more interesting to read. At least the writing is passably decent, at least compared to most of Hong Ying's contemporaries in the genre. If you want to read an example of this tripe, this one is the most tolerable, but don't you have better things to do with your money?

Rating:
Summary: A well-written and insightful novel
Review: This is a well-written and meaningful novel. It is primarily about the experience of a woman, much more than it is about the experience of being in 1989 Beijing. The poet Lin Ying's journey is a series of painful disillusionments that many readers will readily identify with. The manner in which she gains strength and ultimately transcends the bleak world around her may be incomprehensible to some men and objectionable to some women, but will be powerful to the sensitive reader. Admittedly, Lin Ying's view of her world is unfamiliar to me as a man - which is the primary reason I found this book to be so worthwhile.