7. February Flowers by Fan Wu
I stayed up last night to finish this book and it's been over eight months since I've done that. Since I'm finished exams, I hope I can devote more time to reading in general and to this challenge in particular.
Product Description (from inside covers)
Set in modern China, February Flowers tells the stories of two young women's journeys to self-discovery and reconciliation with the past.
Seventeen-year-old Ming and twenty-four-year-old Yan have very little in common other than studying at the same college. Ming, idealistic and preoccupied, lives in her own world of books, music, and imagination. Yan, by contrast, is sexy but cynical, beautiful but wild, with no sense of home. When the two meet and become friends, Ming's world is forever changed. But their differences in upbringing and ideology ultimately drive them apart, leaving each to face her dark secret alone.
Insightful, sophisticated, and rich with complex characters, February Flowers captures a society torn between tradition and modernity, dogma and freedom. It is a meditation on friendship, family, love, loss, and redemption and how a background shapes a life.
Why I chose this book
It was almost the end of term and I happened to be browsing the bookstore before a dinner I had to go to. I was keeping my eye out for a book by a person of colour while I was browsing. I admit I was drawn to the cover of the paperback but the blurb really caught my attention because it was about modern China, after the Cultural Revolution, when the government was trying to become an economic superpower. This tied in neatly with my new-found interest in modern China, which I had picked up from a paper I had finished recently for my elective, Post-colonial Studies in Architecture. My topic had been on Beijing and Shanghai but some of my reading had been about other Chinese cities, especially Shenzhen and Guangzhou, which were where most of the story takes place. I was also drawn in by the story because it was from a female perspective. And I was especially drawn to the book because it used a poem I had learned as its inspiration for the title (Du Mu's poem about a mountain walk mentions February flowers).
Impressions of the book
I liked the amount of detail the author included. To me, it never felt like she was overdescribing anything. Possibly because this world was so unfamiliar to me but also because she included what seemed like very mundane details, e.g. the kind of laundry that was hanging from clothesline of her fellow students, that revealed a lot of the background situation to me. I liked that the relationships in the book are not easy or pat. There were times when I wanted to yell at the characters to not be so stupid but I came to care for them too. I also liked that the author left loose ends, especially with the ambiguous but hopeful ending.
Edited to add: Part of the main character's coming-of-age/discovery included some vague homosexual feelings and it was interesting to me to learn that apparently there was a false statistic circulated that China had no homosexuals. This isn't a major development in that the main character doesn't act on her feelings or give the possibility serious thought but it's there all the same. It however colours the relationship between her and her best friend, some of their behaviour and their romantic relationships.
Fan Wu is coming out with a new book this July so I'm excited for that and will definitely check it out. I'm also going to try to read her Chinese writings as a way to learn the written language.
Product Description (from inside covers)
Set in modern China, February Flowers tells the stories of two young women's journeys to self-discovery and reconciliation with the past.
Seventeen-year-old Ming and twenty-four-year-old Yan have very little in common other than studying at the same college. Ming, idealistic and preoccupied, lives in her own world of books, music, and imagination. Yan, by contrast, is sexy but cynical, beautiful but wild, with no sense of home. When the two meet and become friends, Ming's world is forever changed. But their differences in upbringing and ideology ultimately drive them apart, leaving each to face her dark secret alone.
Insightful, sophisticated, and rich with complex characters, February Flowers captures a society torn between tradition and modernity, dogma and freedom. It is a meditation on friendship, family, love, loss, and redemption and how a background shapes a life.
Why I chose this book
It was almost the end of term and I happened to be browsing the bookstore before a dinner I had to go to. I was keeping my eye out for a book by a person of colour while I was browsing. I admit I was drawn to the cover of the paperback but the blurb really caught my attention because it was about modern China, after the Cultural Revolution, when the government was trying to become an economic superpower. This tied in neatly with my new-found interest in modern China, which I had picked up from a paper I had finished recently for my elective, Post-colonial Studies in Architecture. My topic had been on Beijing and Shanghai but some of my reading had been about other Chinese cities, especially Shenzhen and Guangzhou, which were where most of the story takes place. I was also drawn in by the story because it was from a female perspective. And I was especially drawn to the book because it used a poem I had learned as its inspiration for the title (Du Mu's poem about a mountain walk mentions February flowers).
Impressions of the book
I liked the amount of detail the author included. To me, it never felt like she was overdescribing anything. Possibly because this world was so unfamiliar to me but also because she included what seemed like very mundane details, e.g. the kind of laundry that was hanging from clothesline of her fellow students, that revealed a lot of the background situation to me. I liked that the relationships in the book are not easy or pat. There were times when I wanted to yell at the characters to not be so stupid but I came to care for them too. I also liked that the author left loose ends, especially with the ambiguous but hopeful ending.
Edited to add: Part of the main character's coming-of-age/discovery included some vague homosexual feelings and it was interesting to me to learn that apparently there was a false statistic circulated that China had no homosexuals. This isn't a major development in that the main character doesn't act on her feelings or give the possibility serious thought but it's there all the same. It however colours the relationship between her and her best friend, some of their behaviour and their romantic relationships.
Fan Wu is coming out with a new book this July so I'm excited for that and will definitely check it out. I'm also going to try to read her Chinese writings as a way to learn the written language.