Four Sisters of Hofei
by Annping Chin
310pp, Bloomsbury, £16.99
Sounds of the River
by Da Chen
307pp, Heinemann, £14.99
The success of Wild Swans at the start of the 1990s turned the Chinese memoir into a genre sensation, beloved of publishers and readers alike. The book skilfully chronicled China's turbulent 20th century through the experiences of three generations of women, and introduced westerners to key events such as the communist takeover, the "great leap forward" and the cultural revolution.
By the late 1990s, Wild Swans had been joined by a clutch of cygnets - To the Edge of the Sky, The Vermilion Gate - mostly family sagas, mostly written by women, and for the most part unremittingly grim. At the close of the decade, it was even rumoured that literary agents had defined "Chinese pain" as a product, because a profit could be made from it. Two new books, however, are nudging the Chinese memoir in fresh directions: towards reminiscences of the post-Mao (1979 onwards) era and towards history-telling that goes beyond cultural revolution struggle sessions.
Four Sisters of Hofei is a biography of the four Chang sisters whose lives, like the three generations of Wild Swans, span the 20th century. Although political suffering is not overlooked, this is not Annping Chin's main focus. Instead, she has meticulously reconstructed a disappeared pre-communist world of benevolent gentry, doting servants and refined artistic pursuits. A wealthy family from Anhui (southeast China), the Changs are a fascinating mix of old-style and modern Chinese values.
The story begins with the deeply traditional marriage of the sisters' parents, Wu-ling and Lu Ying, in 1906. Within a few years, Lu Ying had produced four daughters, Yuan-ho, Yun-ho, Chao-ho and Ch'ung-ho. Sixteen years and nine children later, Lu Ying died in childbirth, and her liberal-minded widower threw his energies and wealth into modern women's education, founding a private girls' school in the southeastern city of Suzhou.
Helped by a rich, enlightened father and a wide-ranging traditional and modern education, the four girls each led varied careers. Yuan-ho, the eldest, married an actor and became an opera singer, leaving the mainland for Taiwan in 1949. Yun-ho, the strong-minded second daughter, was driven into flight by the Sino-Japanese war, but remained in China after the communist takeover, enduring interrogation by Red Guards in 1968. Chao-ho married Shen Congwen, one of modern China's finest novelists. Chin's account of their romance, told through correspondence, explores the personal life of an exceptional literary mind, charting his breakdown and attempted suicide on the eve of the communist "liberation". An authority on traditional Chinese arts, Ch'ong-ho broke entirely with her homeland after 1949 and settled in the west with her German-Jewish husband, perhaps anticipating the destruction the communists would shortly wreak on the ancient culture she loved so much.
If Four Sisters of Hofei resembles a genteel drama of a China in transition from traditional to modern values, punctuated but not dominated by the disruptions of war and politics, Da Chen's Sounds of the River - the second in his trilogy of memoirs - records an altogether earthier class of experience. By the second page of a book described inexplicably on its cover jacket as "lyrical", he is receiving bladder counselling from his fellow train passengers; by page 10 he's stifling burps and daydreaming about Thai prostitutes.
Volume one of his memoirs, Colours of the Mountain, recounted his first 16 years, spent growing up in Fujian (south China) in a persecuted landlord's family during the cultural revolution. Bullied at school, the disaffected Da Chen hangs around with drinking, smoking, gambling chums, before realising his only escape route from a life in the paddy fields lies in passing the national college exams that are reinstated in 1978 after the end of the cultural revolution. After months of swotting, the hooligan-turned-wunderkind comes good and becomes the first person from his village to get into a Beijing university to read English.
Sounds of the River describes his college years in the late 70s and early 80s. After three days on the train from Fujian, he reaches the capital and immediately has to face down the snobbery of his city-slicker fellow students towards a country boy. But soon he is in the friendlier company of his roommates Bo and Hong, who fill him in on essential details of everyday life, such as what kind of farts to expect from the Beijing diet of steamed bread.
Although not an immortal stylist, Da Chen is an irrepressibly engaging narrator and has captured the contradictions of a creakily liberalising post-Mao China. Students are wearing high heels and listening to western music - activities that were unthinkable only a couple of years before, at the close of the cultural revolution. But the repressive cant of state socialism (what Da Chen lyrically calls "communist crap") remains very much in evidence. As he orders Da Chen to attend politics classes under pain of expulsion, the college dean describes foreigners on campus as "capitalistic, bourgeois-minded liberals with their corrupted lifestyles".
Annping Chin and Da Chen have given western readers something new to think about modern China. While not ignoring the ubiquitous traumas and tragedies of the 20th century, their books show that individuals in China were able to maintain an identity, and even to enjoy themselves as private, non-political beings. The Chinese memoir is moving further along the trail first blazed by Wild Swans.
· Julia Lovell's translation of the Chinese novel A Dictionary of Maqiao will be published this year.
