Three Sisters

Starred review from April 12, 2010
With a mercilessly satirical eye, Bi (The Moon Opera
) observes domestic and communal life in late 20th-century China as three of the seven daughters of Wang Lianfang strive for identity and self-respect. In 1971, when serial philanderer Wang is finally caught, he loses his job and the family loses face. Yumi, his eldest daughter, is forsaken by her fiancé and becomes the second wife to an older man in a nearby town. This is a step up, but her new home is no less a hothouse of gossip and suspicion. The third sister, beautiful Yuxiu, follows Yumi with big hopes that are derailed by an unexpected pregnancy. A decade later, youngest sister Yuyang is poised to escape a dreary fate when she’s accepted by a school in Beijing, but she, too, has heartbreak in store. Bi describes with a sober bluntness the coarse brutality and familial and community power jockeying that plays out in villages where life is governed by strict rituals, superstition, and folk beliefs. Drawn with dispassionate candor, this is a bleak tale of human miseries and of women struggling to survive in a culture that devalues them.

March 15, 2010
A second novel in English from the Chinese screenwriter and author (The Moon Opera, 2009).

As they grow up in a rural community, Yumi, Yuxiu and Yuyang must negotiate both tradition and Mao's Cultural Revolution. Their village is named for their family and dominated by their father, Party Secretary Wang Lianfang, and they enjoy the status that goes with both their name and Secretary Wang's place in the Communist hierarchy—Yumi even manages to become engaged to a pilot. But everything changes when their father loses his position in a scandal. Suddenly the girls are pariahs, vulnerable to every slight and cruelty a close-knit community can devise. In the latter part of the novel Bi follows his protagonists as they attempt to build lives for themselves in modern China. Despite its rather slender size, this book is epic in scope, and epic doesn't seem to be Bi's best form. One of the pleasures of The Moon Opera was its emotional tautness and compelling drama—like opera itself. Three Sisters, however, is rather rambling and aimless. Readers have ample opportunity to lose interest in the narrative while bogged down in minutiae. This could be a matter of cultural translation, of course.

The story and its details might resonate for a Chinese audience—or, for that matter, Western readers well-versed in contemporary history—but it is unlikely to captivate most English-language readers.

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March 15, 2010
Although the cover of Bi's novel displays a character for "triple happiness"ostensibly representing the eponymous three sistersreaders shouldn't expect a happily-ever-after tale. After seven daughters, Party Secretary Wang sees his self-esteem redeemed with the birth of a son. Firstborn Yumi, the de facto matriarch, reclaims the family's dignity by parading the prized baby before her father's mistresses. But Wang's philandering shatters Yumi's own marriage prospects, and Yumi leaves the constrictive Wang Family Village as the lesser second wife of an older city official. Third sister Yuxiu eventually joins Yumi's household, having nowhere else to go as she is "ruined" after being brutally gang-raped. The promise of an education helps seventh sister Yuyang escape, but her academic career is hardly stellar. VERDICT Bi ("The Moon Opera") is an award-winning Chinese novelist and screenwriter, but his presumptive efforts to capture the three sisters' deepest thoughts and feelings prove superficial and unconvincing. Readers interested in the challenging lives of China's ordinary citizens during the Cultural Revolution will better appreciate such resonating titles as Yiyun Li's "The Vagrants", Yu Hua's "Chronicle of a Blood Merchant", or Xinran's nonfiction "The Good Women of China".Terry Hong, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, Washington, DC

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2010
Set in China in the 1970s and 1980s, Bis novel follows three sisters from a small village. Yumi, Yuxiu, and Yuyang are three of the seven daughters of a lecherous Communist Party secretary who spends more time bedding other mens wives than he does working. Disgusted by her fathers affairs, eldest daughter Yumi plots her escape through marriage. Her romance with a young aviator ends after two of her sisters are raped, leading Yumi to seek out a marriage with a much older government official. Shes perturbed when her beautiful, seductive younger sister Yuxiu, her reputation ruined after her rape, follows her to her new home and ingratiates herself with the sullen daughter of Yumis husband, Guo Jiaxing. The rivalry between the two sisters comes to a head when Yuxiu and Guos adult son fall in love. Though the novel loses steam in the final section, which focuses on the youngest sister Yuyangs exploits at a teacher-training school, this is an involving look at the difficulties of womens lives in Communist China.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)