Meng Jin

When Su Lan dies unexpectedly it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother's ashes to China - to her, an unknown country

Little Gods

Eva Ströberg

This book starts with the end, and some of the storytelling went back in time. It's perhaps due to Su Lan, one of the main characters, studied theoretical physics and entropy and although she never clearly said that we could reverse time, she fantasized that one day human would have understanding that linear timeline is just an illusion, just as people from back then thought the world was flat.

But don't worry, the book doesn't talk much about physics, be it theoretical physics or nuclear, but it's mostly about 4 characters: Zhang Bo, Li YongZong, and Su Lan who went to high school together and ended up in different places with different fates. What happened in Beijing in 1989 changed Su Lan and YongZong's lives and the the life of the 4th character here.

I found this book easy to read, good flow, despite of the jumbled timeline. I'm always interested on how Chinese people perceive the incident in 1989, do they know? If they do, how do they find out and how do they feel about it?

rita

my favourite book ive read in the past year- loved the story telling and the characters. feels like a movie that my mom would describe as “artistic”. lowkey hated liya though! and some of the actions felt unrealistic but i enjoyed it nonetheless. i love this book so so much

basically i love books that are informational and ?? almost mysterious?? idk but i really loved this book! did not expect to like it this much

“Compellingly complex…Expands the future of the immigrant novel even as it holds us in uneasy thrall to the past.” – Gish Jen, New York Times Book Review Combining the emotional resonance of Home Fire with the ambition and innovation of Asymmetry, a lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel that explores the complex web of grief, memory, time, physics, history, and selfhood in the immigrant experience, and the complicated bond between daughters and mothers. On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China—to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense of displacement. A story of migrations literal and emotional, spanning time, space and class, Little Gods is a sharp yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an immigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections to memory, history, and self.

A Novel

altlovesbooks

This was a tough book for me to get through. The main subject of the book is a physicist named Su Lan, who lives in Beijing and gave birth to a daughter on the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre. After she gives birth to the daughter, her mental state steadily declines. But rather than reading the book from her point of view, we get to know Su Lan from the point of view of four people who are greatly impacted by her life. The point of view hops between these four people periodically during the book, and the story of Su Lan and her state of mind isn’t told chronologically either. Personally, I find these other characters more compelling and interesting than Su Lan herself. Complicating matters is the author’s writing style. There are no quotation marks indicating when someone is speaking, so it can be difficult to follow the flow of a conversation, or know when someone is speaking vs. thinking. Finally the author sprinkles in words of Shanghainese (a dialect, as I learned through Google) without context or translation, and Google is less than helpful when it comes to these local words. Su Lan's daughter plays a large role in the last third of the book, and the resolution at the end is somewhat dull and unsatisfying.

All things together, the secondary characters were fleshed out well and were interesting, and the author does write some beautiful prose. Unfortunately the writing style and ultimately uninteresting plot weren't enough for me to rate the book higher.

Little Gods

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