Never Thought I'd End Up Here

Last year I read Ann Liang's I Hope This Doesn't Find You and was bemused by its transcontinental ambiguity. Never Thought I'd End Up Here is more firmly rooted in an American background, but its characters are swiftly translocated to a two week student trip to China, where the young protagonists can explore their heritage and family language.

Narrator Leah is battling not just her judgmental extended family, but a complicated personal history which encompasses changing schools under suspicion of attacking and injuring a fellow student, being overlooked as plain and dull, and then giving herself an extreme makeover which resulted in a modelling career -- which she has just quit, leaving her directionless. No wonder she's confused! And when the China trip reunites her with her nemesis, Cyrus, the one who accused her of hurting him, Leah is torn between a plan for revenge and ... starting to like him?

I'm sure you can guess how the story unfolds (I definitely did think we'd end up here), but Liang pushes all the right buttons for an audience eager for young adult romance. My school librarian friend assures me that her books fly off the shelves, and she is a New York Times bestselling author, so she's certainly found a winning formula. Never Thought I'd End Up Here is not quite my cup of tea, but an entertaining and polished ride.

Wild Swans

I am extremely late to the party on Jung Chang's international bestseller from 1991, Wild Swans. If you've been living under a rock for the last thirty years, Wild Swans is the story of three generations of women living in China through the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century. Jung Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine; her mother was a dedicated Communist Party official; and Jung herself eventually studied English and emigrated to the UK.

Wild Swans has been a school text almost from the moment it was published. My younger daughter used it in studying Revolutions and the copy I've been reading is hers. My ignorance of China's history is shamefully almost total, and Wild Swans filled in quite a few blanks for me. I vaguely knew about the Cultural Revolution, but not quite what a horrific period it was, nor the extent of the arbitrary violence and cruelty it unleashed. The tides of being in and out of favour washed Chang's family to and fro; sometimes they enjoyed quite a lot of privilege, sometimes things were absolutely desperate.

For me, Wild Swans started slowly and it took me a while to become captured by the story. The book really came alive for me when Jung Chang herself appeared, and I sometimes found the parts about the internal machinations of the Communist Party head-spinning. However, I was excited when simultaneously reading Mark Colvin's autobiography, Light and Shadow, to come across a section when Colvin was travelling through China in the early 1970s and he was told about the death of important general Lin Biao -- a very deliberate piece of information-planting whose significance young Colvin completely failed to recognise! Thanks to Wild Swans, I already knew the background story of Lin Biao, so this story meant much more than it would have otherwise.

 

Deadly Quiet City

 

I borrowed Murong Xuecun's Deadly Quiet City from the library after seeing it mentioned on Crikey (my go-to news website). Wow, what a read. It recounts the first hand stories of Wuhan residents in the very first days of the pandemic, before anyone knew or admitted that it was a pandemic -- stories gathered at great personal risk by Murong Xuecun, whispered in hotel rooms and smuggled out of the country, told by people who still feared the repercussions if it was discovered that they had spoken: in the parlance of the Chinese Communist Party, 'made mischief' and 'stirred up trouble' or 'supported foreign propaganda.'

The stories these citizens tell are truly hair-raising. There is a wide variety of experiences here -- a hospital cleaner, a grieving mother, a doctor, a volunteer at a health station, a defiant rebel. Some remain faithful to the Party despite everything they've gone through, others became totally disillusioned, others were always inclined to be suspicious of power. But all their stories of the chaos and cover-ups, the desperation and horror of those early days, are vivid and terrifying.

Deadly Quiet City includes an appendix timeline compiled by Australian academic Clive Hamilton, which has really convinced me that the 'bat in the wet market' line doesn't really stand up, and perhaps the 'virus escaped from the lab' story might be the correct one after all. But Deadly Quiet City isn't just a book about a breaking pandemic -- it's also a book about what it's like to live in China, in a tightly controlled society, many of whose members are content to trade personal freedoms for security. As a person who inclines towards favouring safety myself, it's made me think twice about the costs of living under a one party state.