Review: Beautiful as Yesterday by Fan Wu
Beautiful as Yesterday
by Fan Wu
Set a few years back, at the turn of the century, Fan Wu’s novel is the story of a three Chinese women, all immigrants to America. Mary Chang, the older of two sisters, lives in Sunnyvale, California with her American-born husband and son. She works hard to be a good mother, faithful Christian and dutiful daughter. Her mother, Wang Fenglan, is coming to visit for six months, and Mary wants her to stay permanently so she can look after her. Fenglan worked hard in a Chinese state-run factory for years, and although she looks forward to visiting her daughter she has no desire to remain in the United States. All her friends and her memories are in her little community in China. Fenglan’s other daughter, Ingrid, came to America as a young student and has absorbed the culture almost absolutely. She loves the independent, unpredictable life she lives in New York City, working as a freelance translator and writing. Ingrid has been estranged from her sister these past few years, but she decides to return to the Bay Area in order to be near her mother and bury the hatchet with Mary. As the family reunites, secrets from the past are revealed and old tensions reignited.
So I live in San Jose, and go to school in Cupertino. For some reason, it’s really weird to read about the South Bay (Sunnyvale’s right next to Cupertino) in a novel. Unlike San Francisco and New York City, authors rarely use this area in their fictional creations. Having local establishments like the mall I work at name-dropped into the narrative in the way normally reserved for more famous monuments like the Golden Gate Bridge or the World Trade Center seems...odd. Almost pretentious, I think. I mean, Valley Fair may be the largest mall in Northern California, but it’s not exactly a name brand recognizable nationwide. If parts of the book actually took place at the mall, its mention would make sense, but it is only brought up in an off-hand way, like “Yaya has been talking…about a piece of lingerie she recently purchased at Victoria’s Secret at Valley Fair Mall.” The same thing happens with local high schools, and other random South Bay locations. The author does this place-dropping throughout the chapters set in other cities as well, but it doesn’t jump out at me in the same way. Am I just being weird? I think so. Maybe you should ignore this paragraph.
Most of the Chinese-American authors I read - Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Laurence Yep were all staples of my childhood and teenage year- are all descendents of Chinese immigrants. It’s very interesting to contrast the stories of these authors with this novel by Fan Wu, because her characters are Chinese-Americans, too, but recent immigrants who identify with a very different China. The People’s Republic of China is a world away from the pre-Mao China experienced by the ancestors of Tan and Wong. This brought a fresh perspective to Beautiful as Yesterday that I really appreciated and enjoyed.
The plot was pretty predictable and the book is written in a static, stiff style. I couldn’t decide if the highly-detailed-yet-awkward prose was intentional, to reflect the characters’ discomfort with English, or if it’s just the author’s own style. Events were reported in such a detached way that I couldn’t really feel emotion for the characters, even when a huge surprise was thrown in at the climax. I still enjoyed the book, and I will probably check out Wu’s next foray into fiction, but it isn’t the instant classic of Asian lit I was hoping for.
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