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Reviewed by:
  • Daughter of the River, and: Summer of Betrayal
  • Richard King (bio)
Hong Ying . Daughter of the River. New York: Grove Press, 1998. 278 pp. Hardcover $24.00, ISBN 0-8021-1637-X.
Hong Ying . Summer of Betrayal. New York: Grove Press, 1997. 183 pp. Paperback $12.00, ISBN 0-8021-3594-3.

"Fate is never kind to women poets," the actress said.

(Summer of Betrayal, p. 74)

These two arresting and disquieting books by the poet and novelist Hong Ying, born in 1962 in Chongqing and resident in London since 1992, deserve to make their author a considerable reputation in the English-speaking world. The memoir Daughter of the River takes her from her hometown to the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989; her novel Summer of Betrayal picks up shortly thereafter, beginning June 4, as the tanks of the PLA roll through Beijing. The world she portrays in both works is a cruel one, where nothing is secure and nobody is to be trusted. Hong Ying is graphic in her descriptions of urban squalor, emotional yearning, the human body, and sexual experience, examining herself with a ruthlessness we do not see in other contemporary Chinese authors, and the writing is powerfully rendered into English by two of the most accomplished translators currently working, Howard Goldblatt (Daughter of the River) and Martha Avery (Summer of Betrayal).

Daughter of the River differs from most of the autobiographical writings by Chinese nationals recently published in the West (see, for example, the review of Zhu Xiao Di's Thirty Years in a Red House elsewhere in this issue of CRI) in its concentration on the physical and emotional experiences of the author rather than on the history of the nation: it is her dysfunctional family, rather than the mismanaged state, that is the cause of Hong Ying's adolescent misery. The book is structured around the author's quest for herself, both in terms of her parentage and place in the family and also of her sexual awakening. The quest takes place in 1980 at the time of her eighteenth birthday, as she learns of, and meets, her biological father, hears the family history from her mother and eldest sister, and has an affair with a teacher from her school. Into this plot are woven the sordid details of her hometown, her family, her earliest memories, and subsequent experiences. But the writing never digresses too far or loses its focus on the author; the result is a compelling narrative, however dreadful the life described may be.

Hong Ying recreates the Chongqing of her childhood as an oppressive, stinking, overcrowded slum characterized by wretched poverty, brawling, and bad temper, the site of "eternal foul odours . . . alien to the socialist image" (p. 4), where the main public entertainment seems to be watching corpses float down the river. [End Page 94] Within "this dark corner, this rotting appendix" (p. 5), her family of eight people lives in two rooms "more crowded than a pigsty" (p. 5), barely surviving on earnings from the coolie labor that exhausts and disfigures her mother. The family attempts to hide itself from the prying eyes of its neighbors, as does the author, suffering agonies of embarrassment at the public toilets, places of stinking filth and public scrutiny of private parts. Resentment pervades relations between the members of Hong Ying's family, and she realizes early that there are guilty secrets in her mother's past. From her eldest sister she learns of her mother's first marriage to a triad gangster (that sister's father), later arrested, and of her second marriage to the present father of the family. It is left to her mother to tell the author, the youngest of her six children, that she is the illegitimate daughter of a younger man who has supported them in the intervening years and who wishes to meet his only child now that she has turned eighteen. It is a matter of greater significance to the former lovers than to Hong Ying; the man dies a few years later.

The author's own romance, with a married man referred to simply as the history teacher, like...

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