Remembering 1942

November 1, 2016
Mao Dun Awardwinning novelist Liu (The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon, 2015) adroitly confronts Very Big Topicsfamily, education, work, bureaucracy, the military, historyin his first translated-into-English story collection. Tofu exposes the numbing tribulations of being a poor family in Beijing. Education bares the grueling sacrifices common citizens make to even attempt higher education. Office and Officials divulge the labyrinthine rituals and relationships of surviving (or not) as peons and government employees. Recruits depicts army trainees whose challenges go far beyond the physical. In the eponymous final story, the collection's highlight, the narrator returns to his home province of Henan to gather information about the real-life famine that claimed three million lives. Tragically, in the global context of 1942, history well remembers Churchill and Gandhi, who made headlines for catching cold and going on a hunger strike, but the Chinese millions remain forever lost. In just six stories (each of near-novella length, fluently rendered by notable translators Goldblatt and Lin), Liu rigorously confronts major facets of contemporary Chinese society with judicious insight and shrewd indictments.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)