The Beijing of Possibilities

April 6, 2009
Tel (Freud’s Alphabet
) spins a collection of dreamlike short stories out of the lives of Beijing’s residents, from crime-fighting, gorilla-costumed messengers to thieves, buskers and composers. The stories form an impression of Beijing on the eve of the 2008 Olympics, weaving in the culture, history and present reality of a city undergoing rapid change. In “The Book of Auspicious and Inauspicious Dreams,” a modern young couple attempts to return the souvenirs of a woman’s bourgeois past, hidden during the Cultural Revolution, which they discover while renovating their apartment. A musician in “Shadow of Candles Flickering Red” remembers picking up the ehru, a traditional Chinese instrument, while being “re-educated” in the Chinese countryside. In “The Most Beautiful Woman in China,” some of these characters reappear in a tale that combines everything from mythological traditions to the sayings of Deng Xiaoping to create a humming, ethereal image of the city and its culture. The collection, part W.G. Sebald and part Italo Calvino, provides a glimpse for the Western reader into the complicated, vibrant world of Beijing.

May 1, 2009
A motley, charmingly odd collection of linked stories about contemporary China.

Tel (Freud's Alphabet, 2003, etc.) offers an ingenious, often surreal account of the tensions between ancient tradition and go-go capitalism. He demonstrates an impressive range of tones, subjects and stratagems. In the opener,"Year of the Gorilla," an illegal resident of Beijing, wearing the suit in which he delivers Gorillagrams, thwarts a mugging and becomes a celebrity, for better and worse."The Unofficial History of the Embroidered Couch" depicts a busy adman who seeks a traditional girl via a dating service and finds himself swapping messages and cell-phone photos with…a Ming Dynasty princess. The title of"Love! Duty! Humanity! Virtue!" riffs ironically on the American propaganda dropped from planes during the Korean War. Crippled as a soldier in that war, Uncle Ha dreams of making his fortune with a cotton-candy machine that he purchases from an army buddy in 1979, as the regime's rules against profit-making enterprise are loosening. But when Ha sends his nephew to town to pick up the machine, the na™ve country boy encounters a terrifying vision of what engagement with the wider world might mean. In the long final story,"The Most Beautiful Woman in China," Tel constructs an imaginative superstructure for the whole book, and in so doing forces the Western reader into an uncomfortable moral accounting.

Smart, subtly observed and entertaining.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2009
In this eclectic collection of a dozen short stories set in China, Tel ("Freud's Alphabet Book") describes a wide range of personalities, hardships, and triumphs. In the title piece, a 29-year-old single woman from a village arranges to be a foster mother to a Beijing couple's newborn for compensation, but her charge dies only hours after the arrangement is made. A year later, she is surprised to be granted coveted residency status in Beijing, but her move to the city is disillusioning. In another story, "The Three Lives of Little Yu," a childless couple try for 30 years to acquire a daughter. Whether describing the mishaps of a singing courier in "Year of the Gorilla," online relationships in "Unofficial History of the Embroidered Couch," or the experiences of a maid in "Rise Upward to the Blue Clouds," Tel manages to write surrealistically and concisely. VERDICT Although academics will more likely gravitate to this title, anyone who can appreciate quirky and offbeat storytelling will enjoy Tel's interpretive look at life in modern China.Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.