Review: Baotown by Wang Anyi

Even a few reviewers of the book back in 1989 couldn't resist commenting on how striking Ms. Wang's back-cover author photo is...

Wang, Anyi. Baotown. Translated by Martha Avery. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989.

This is an extraordinarily thoughtful story of an impoverished but benevolent Chinese village. It begins with slow-moving portraits of various characters -- the boy who wants to be a writer, the strong-willed teenage girl, the old man who wishes he were dead, the young boy who will be his friend -- and on and on.

But just when you think it's nothing more than a Chinese Spoon River Anthology, an exciting sequence of climaxes proves Wang's mettle as story teller of real power and insight. People die! Lovers break up and come back together! Huge natural disasters strike! And throughout, the real value is clearly human goodness in its purest form, a love of life that is willing to sacrifice to help another life continue.

The final chapters drag our little village into the public life of mass media when a good little boy's memorial biography becomes an exemplary life. This resolves the tale and also tells us more than a good deal of scholarship about how biography works in modern China!