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A review by now_booking
Fu Ping by Wang Anyi, Howard Goldblatt
2.0
1.5 Stars
This is a book I struggled with. It’s not that it’s a difficult read, I just struggled to understand what it was supposed to be. Part anthropological document, part character sketch, it’s hard to understand exactly what this work of fiction was trying to achieve. It’s more a series of in-depth neighborhood descriptions and historical context descriptions and sketches of lower socioeconomic status stock characters from Shanghai’s post-Civil War. Where it did succeed, is that I learned quite a bit about the experience and environment of rural migrants to Shanghai in the mid 20th century. So, I’d say as a supplement to an academic course, this is probably not bad.
The title character Fu Ping, is a young woman who is brought to the city by her prospective mother-in-law (Nainai), to prepare Fu Ping, for marrying her adopted son. A somewhat wooden character whose psyche and motivations aren’t quite clear, Fu Ping has zero interest in marrying Nainai’s adopted son or anyone for that matter. What does she want? We never quite know. If I was to hazard a guess, I would say maybe “belonging” but then she’s such a flat and unsympathetic character, that if that’s the case, she’s a self-saboteur.
My main issue with this novel is I think the voice in which it’s written. From the author’s note at the beginning, you sense a sort of condescending, top-down approach, a hierarchical way of looking at lower income people who migrated from rural areas to populate the slums of Shanghai in the mid 20th century. All the characters in this novel are presented like a series of one-dimensional sketches, given flaws, but they’re all presented as being somewhat naive, good eggs without any capacity for true villainy. The result of this is that in the same breath that the author describes someone as being a bad guy, the person is giving a redeeming counter quality. So, you end up with characters who are simultaneously oblivious and sharply observant, simultaneously stubborn and agreeable, placid and bad tempered. And it’s like which is it??! Furthermore, there’s not enough of a plot involving these characters for you as a reader to make your own judgements as to the personalities of the characters.
I think this could be an interesting read for someone whose main goal is academic for example, maybe using literature to get some sort of anecdotal narrative insight into the culture and environment of Shanghai slums in the mid 20th century. There is a lot to learn here about that setting and this book presents a series of observations that I suppose are fictionalized and that’s why this is being called a novel. As a novel however, this didn’t really work for me. It is very much a character-based book but then the characters felt very flat and ambiguous and the plot didn’t feel cohesive or strong. This also contains extensive descriptions of the environment in Shanghai slums in the era that could be extremely interesting to an academic reader or history buff but may be less so to the casual reader. Because this book was translated from the original Chinese, I’m not sure to what extent my issues with the language in this book are related to the original words and intentions of the author or which are related to translation or even to my own failings of not understanding the cultural context of the language and syntax. However, this is not my first book translated from Chinese- I tend to enjoy Far East Asian historical fiction which is why I was excited to read this and am pretty disappointed that it didn’t work for me.
I got an advanced reading copy of this book from Columbia University Press through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review!
This is a book I struggled with. It’s not that it’s a difficult read, I just struggled to understand what it was supposed to be. Part anthropological document, part character sketch, it’s hard to understand exactly what this work of fiction was trying to achieve. It’s more a series of in-depth neighborhood descriptions and historical context descriptions and sketches of lower socioeconomic status stock characters from Shanghai’s post-Civil War. Where it did succeed, is that I learned quite a bit about the experience and environment of rural migrants to Shanghai in the mid 20th century. So, I’d say as a supplement to an academic course, this is probably not bad.
The title character Fu Ping, is a young woman who is brought to the city by her prospective mother-in-law (Nainai), to prepare Fu Ping, for marrying her adopted son. A somewhat wooden character whose psyche and motivations aren’t quite clear, Fu Ping has zero interest in marrying Nainai’s adopted son or anyone for that matter. What does she want? We never quite know. If I was to hazard a guess, I would say maybe “belonging” but then she’s such a flat and unsympathetic character, that if that’s the case, she’s a self-saboteur.
My main issue with this novel is I think the voice in which it’s written. From the author’s note at the beginning, you sense a sort of condescending, top-down approach, a hierarchical way of looking at lower income people who migrated from rural areas to populate the slums of Shanghai in the mid 20th century. All the characters in this novel are presented like a series of one-dimensional sketches, given flaws, but they’re all presented as being somewhat naive, good eggs without any capacity for true villainy. The result of this is that in the same breath that the author describes someone as being a bad guy, the person is giving a redeeming counter quality. So, you end up with characters who are simultaneously oblivious and sharply observant, simultaneously stubborn and agreeable, placid and bad tempered. And it’s like which is it??! Furthermore, there’s not enough of a plot involving these characters for you as a reader to make your own judgements as to the personalities of the characters.
I think this could be an interesting read for someone whose main goal is academic for example, maybe using literature to get some sort of anecdotal narrative insight into the culture and environment of Shanghai slums in the mid 20th century. There is a lot to learn here about that setting and this book presents a series of observations that I suppose are fictionalized and that’s why this is being called a novel. As a novel however, this didn’t really work for me. It is very much a character-based book but then the characters felt very flat and ambiguous and the plot didn’t feel cohesive or strong. This also contains extensive descriptions of the environment in Shanghai slums in the era that could be extremely interesting to an academic reader or history buff but may be less so to the casual reader. Because this book was translated from the original Chinese, I’m not sure to what extent my issues with the language in this book are related to the original words and intentions of the author or which are related to translation or even to my own failings of not understanding the cultural context of the language and syntax. However, this is not my first book translated from Chinese- I tend to enjoy Far East Asian historical fiction which is why I was excited to read this and am pretty disappointed that it didn’t work for me.
I got an advanced reading copy of this book from Columbia University Press through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review!