KEY POINTS:
Western audiences have been fascinated by books about China for centuries, but the wrenching transformation of China over the last half-century has brought forth a seemingly endless wave of writing.
Post-Mao memoirs of Chinese life have become wildly popular over the last decade. It's a field made popular by Jung Chang's Wild Swans, crowded with other accounts of tribulation and woe and set to become even more crowded in the year of the Beijing Olympics.
Fortunately, Charles N. Li's The Bitter Sea stands out from - and above - its many competitors, a tale both eminently worth telling and remarkably well-told.
Despite the subtitle, Li's story actually straddles the Republican and Maoist eras, telling the story of his youth and adolescence from 1940 to 1961. Li's comfortable upper-class childhood was transformed in 1945, when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's agents seized the family home and assets as punishment for his father's wartime collaboration with the Japanese. Li lived hand-to-mouth in a slum outside Nanjing for three years, stayed with an aunt in Shanghai as Mao's armies liberated the city in 1949, and in 1950 fled the regimentation of communist rule to Hong Kong.
Only Li's eventual success in the United States ended the suffering and eventually repaired the shattered father-son bond.
This is a threefold tale of national crisis, personal discovery and the ties that bind, held together by wicked humour and genuine flair.
Li's vivid descriptions grip the reader's attention like a vice.
The occasional reflections on politics and society are unflinching but refreshingly free of rancour, viewing the Communist Party and the Hong Kong colonial authorities with the same sharp eye - but it's the personal tale that really hits home, with Li running that same observational eye over his life and relationships to heart-rending effect.
The result is not just one of the best-written life stories out of China for the last few years, but a top-notch memoir in its own right. Highly recommended.
The Bitter Sea: Coming of age in a China before Mao
By Charles N. Li (HarperCollins $34.99)
* Sam Finnemore is an Auckland reviewer.
