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A review by jillkt13
I Am China by Xiaolu Guo
3.0
I Am China marks a step back for Guo following her superb earlier novels Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth and A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Where her previous novels shined was their capture of tiny people and their tiny lives, which Guo depicted with such loving detail to anchor readers in previously impossible-to-know times and places.
I Am China is unmistakably vaster, as its brazen title might suggest. Gone are Guo's snowglobe settings where the entire tale takes place in a certain Beijing neighborhood or a dark London flat, here the story unfolds on a tour bus spanning the United States, in Beijing and a village in Guangdong, a ship sailing to Crete, a Parisian nightclub, a Swiss detention center, a London pub, and a Scottish island occupied by shepherds. While epic tableaux can sometimes backdrop epic stories, Guo didn't find the right balance here. Her framing device, a British 30-something tasked to translate the mysterious letters of a Chinese couple, distracts from the far more interesting story of the aforementioned couple. And the fact that her translations are accompanied by occasional forays into the minds of the Chinese couple punctures the possibility of suspense: we are made to read the couple's letters, which describe events from a distant time, and then we are occasionally allowed to listen into the emotional reflections of the couple on that distant time. As a narrative device, it's tedious beyond belief.
And yet, if you remove the translator framing device, you'll find Guo's most political book yet. The Chinese couple involves a punk rocker critical of the government seeking asylum in Europe and his supportive but pragmatic wife, torn between love and comfort. Guo not only delivers sharp criticism of China but also of inhumane immigration policies in Europe. Wherever your eye can see, she seems to say, there is something ugly.
Love and art saved Guo's protagonists in her early novels. She shirks simple explanations in I Am China. It's certainly a more complicated, more thoughtful work, but it sacrifices hard-earned truths for ambiguity. Perhaps a more realistic tone for our era but less enjoyable and more forgettable for me at the end of the day.
I Am China is unmistakably vaster, as its brazen title might suggest. Gone are Guo's snowglobe settings where the entire tale takes place in a certain Beijing neighborhood or a dark London flat, here the story unfolds on a tour bus spanning the United States, in Beijing and a village in Guangdong, a ship sailing to Crete, a Parisian nightclub, a Swiss detention center, a London pub, and a Scottish island occupied by shepherds. While epic tableaux can sometimes backdrop epic stories, Guo didn't find the right balance here. Her framing device, a British 30-something tasked to translate the mysterious letters of a Chinese couple, distracts from the far more interesting story of the aforementioned couple. And the fact that her translations are accompanied by occasional forays into the minds of the Chinese couple punctures the possibility of suspense: we are made to read the couple's letters, which describe events from a distant time, and then we are occasionally allowed to listen into the emotional reflections of the couple on that distant time. As a narrative device, it's tedious beyond belief.
And yet, if you remove the translator framing device, you'll find Guo's most political book yet. The Chinese couple involves a punk rocker critical of the government seeking asylum in Europe and his supportive but pragmatic wife, torn between love and comfort. Guo not only delivers sharp criticism of China but also of inhumane immigration policies in Europe. Wherever your eye can see, she seems to say, there is something ugly.
Love and art saved Guo's protagonists in her early novels. She shirks simple explanations in I Am China. It's certainly a more complicated, more thoughtful work, but it sacrifices hard-earned truths for ambiguity. Perhaps a more realistic tone for our era but less enjoyable and more forgettable for me at the end of the day.