Tiananmen Square by Lai Wen. Spiegel & Grau, 2024. 528 pages.
Shanghailanders by Juli Min. Spiegel & Grau, 2024. 288 pages.
TO TITLE A NOVEL Shanghailanders unavoidably invokes the classic works of Eileen Chang (1920-95), patron saint of Shanghai's urban imaginary: its apartments and alleys, its gossip and balconies, its local neighborhoods and foreign enclaves. Yet Juli Min's debut novel, published earlier this year, is only obliquely a novel about a city and more a peripatetic chronicle of several people who at one point called it home. It commits less to the attachment that Chang (also known as Zhang Ailing) has to place than it does to her adoration of the cosmopolitan. A major figure in the history of modern Chinese literature, but perhaps best known to many in the West now for writing the 1979 novella that became the 2007 film Lust, Caution, Chang was raised speaking English in a wealthy household. Her mother sojourned often in Europe throughout her childhood, and Chang, too, harbored hopes of a globe-trotting lifestyle. "I determined that I was going to learn how to make animated movies as a means of introducing Chinese painting to the United States," she writes in the essay "Whispers" (trans. Andrew F. Jones). "I wanted to make an even bigger splash than Lin Yutang. I wanted to wear only the most exquisite and elegant clothing, to roam the world, to have my own house in Shanghai, to live a crisp and unfettered existence."
Min's Shanghailanders follows in nonchronological, vignette fashion the lives of the Yang family -- father Leo, mother Eko, daughters Yumi, Yoko, and Kiko -- living that crisp, unfettered, globe-trotting life of which Chang dreamed. Distance is an abstraction. Characters skim across continents in half a sentence. When the novel opens, Leo is gliding along on the high-speed maglev from Pudong Airport to Shanghai, having just said goodbye to his wife and daughters, who are flying to Boston for school. Leo is a real estate investor made wealthy by the modernization of Shanghai, and the family regularly travels between homes in Kyoto, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, and Bordeaux. They toggle easily between languages -- Japanese for privacy, French for flirtation, English when the parents aren't present. Eko and the girls are multiracial, pan-Asian -- according to a DNA test, some Japanese, some Chinese, some Korean, some Siberian. Min's globe-skimming, time-spanning style -- the novel begins in the year 2040 and toggles effortlessly between timelines -- is delightful and technically impressive: no encounters feel flattened by globalization. Here is the topography of a maximally cosmopolitan life: credit card debt racking up in stores on Boston's Newbury and Boylston Streets; lipsticks purchased in airport duty-free stores; meditations in gardens flowing between Paris, Sicily, Suzhou, and Guizhou.
Is this paradise? Not quite. An unmoored malaise floats through the novel. The daughters, trapped by too many options, struggle to ground their lives. The youngest, Kiko, bored at her elite international school, turns to prostitution for a quick thrill. Middle daughter Yoko, accidentally pregnant with her boyfriend's child, consults with her mother on where best to get her abortion: the United States is too dangerous, and Shanghai too exposed, so Paris it is. Eldest daughter Yumi, kicked out by her roommates at Harvard due to her kleptomania, imagines her options if she leaves: "Or she might go to a different school. A different country. England. France." The girls' lives present a dizzying array of options. Their actions have no consequences. When they have made a mess of a place, they leave it. In their inability to settle for one good life, they suffer the curse of the free-floating cosmopolitan diagnosed by Heinz Bude and Jörg Dürrschmidt -- that "globalization widens the field of spatial and consumptive optionality, but does not provide an escape from the daunting insight that we only have this one life to live."
Yumi, Yoko, and Kiko were born multilingual, multiracial, multinational. They have always drifted between worlds. They don't know what kind of belonging they seek for they have never experienced it. Not so for their parents Leo and Eko, whose efforts and luck made such freedom possible. Eko lingers on the friction between worlds -- her languages are not as strong: "Her vocabularies were all mediocre, blending into one another, replacing one another" -- and she is ambivalent about her role as an unemployed mother, which Leo's success has made possible. Early in their marriage, she struggles to adapt to life in Shanghai. She is repulsed by the enclosures, gossip, and proximity that define the nostalgic visions of Shanghai offered by both Wang Anyi (1954- ), now the city's quintessential writer, and her predecessor Chang. Eko longs for the anonymity of travel; she feels "the urge to go away, to not be seen." Meanwhile, Leo's center of gravity remains China. He is a cosmopolitan by working necessity, not by desire or nature. When he is abroad, he clings to any fellow Chinese he can find. He and Eko both need roots, but they cannot agree on where those roots should be. Where Eko dislikes China, Leo dislikes Japan and France. He is intimidated by his wife's "fluency, her comfort in a world where he would always be a visitor." And so the Yang family remains in regular transit, trying to satisfy all preferences at once.
Above all, Leo is driven by a terror of the global catastrophe he is convinced is coming: the collapse of all systems, the shrinking of the world. He clings to the idea of a single safe space and insists the girls spend weekends at a family farm outside Shanghai during their childhood, learning survival skills to survive the coming apocalypse. In a world of uncertainty, let the nuclear family remain as the single safe haven. But the family is fracturing. Distance has not been good for them. In the novel's most accomplished and emotionally fraught vignette, "Ponies on the Mountain in the City on the Sea," Min shows us a family splitting apart. A fight between sisters spirals into tragedy, and the girls never return to the farm again. The Yang family resumes some semblance of normalcy, but the intimacy is gone: the rest of the novel is underwritten by the threat that, absent the centripetal forces of the nuclear family, all five will eventually be cast adrift. Shanghailanders effectively examines the sacrifice of that crisp, unfettered life. If, as Zhang Xudong has argued, "the cosmopolitan aura of current literature on Shanghai is underscored by a longing for locality, particularity, and rootedness," then Shanghailanders -- despite its formal innovations -- is, after all, a classic Shanghai novel.
Where Shanghailanders spins outwards across time and space, Lai Wen's debut novel Tiananmen Square (2024) enters squarely into a saturated discourse about one particular time and place: Tiananmen Square, June 1989. Lai Wen, a Beijing-born writer who left China after her own participation in the protests and now lives in the United Kingdom (though her book's protagonist heads to Canada), joins a number of exiles and emigrants -- including Ma Jian, Liu Hong, Ha Jin, Shen Tong, and others -- who have written books about the event. As Belinda Kong has observed, the wave of political evacuation catalyzed by the events of 1989 has both galvanized the politics of the Chinese literary diaspora and enshrined that year's protests as a thematic hallmark of diasporic works. Tiananmen Square by Lai Wen (a pseudonym) is therefore the latest entry in what Kong calls a "third, transformative space" of diasporic writing in which a complex set of questions continues to be negotiated. How credible were eyewitness reports? In what way, if any, were the students at fault? How should we now assess the pro-democracy movement? What right does the emigrant class have to speak of Chinese politics? And how, when publishing in English, should diaspora writers navigate the "tension between anticommunist contestation and potential neo-orientalism"?
Lai's contribution to this space is a meditation on memory. Tiananmen Square bears the hallmarks of a novel drawn heavily from autobiography: scenes of clear significance to the author, though not necessarily to the story. We linger on descriptions of each of the protagonist's childhood friends (presumably closely modeled on Lai's own), the pranks they pulled, the rules of the games they played, the fights they got into, the snot dripping from their noses. These scenes are indulgent, perhaps, in a novel that spans 500 pages; certainly, they detract from the novel's structure and pacing. But Tiananmen Square is not a tight, neat story: it is meticulous emotional documentation, an attempt to remember an adolescence before the author begins to forget. These are scenes written not because the reader needs to know but because the author needs to remember. Late in the novel, during a reprieve by a lake, Lai's friend Anna tells her of the significance of even the "strange and weird" memories one accumulates throughout one's life: "They remind you that you were around, you know? That you lived."
The opening sentence -- "My earliest memory is of my grandmother" -- declares the novel's major thematic concerns: Lai's relationship with her grandmother, her childhood in post-Cultural Revolution China, and her grandmother's memories of a China before the revolution. Memories are resistant and inconvenient. Her grandmother's regular interjections -- "You haven't forgotten what happened at the end of the fifties, have you, daughter?" (referring to the famine following the Great Leap Forward) -- offer constant subversions of the political mythologies Lai has been taught to accept. But memory is also fragile -- Lai's coming-of-age unfolds in parallel with her grandmother's gradual decline from dementia. As Lai graduates from high school, applies to university, pursues her first sexual relationship, and begins questioning the social order around her, her grandmother slowly loses her moorings in reality. After witnessing her grandmother withdraw into a frightened, childlike state, Lai is inspired to write an essay on memory for a school assignment: "Being human is about remembering. We are the sum of all our memories. [...] But when we lose track of our memories, that is when we are at our most human. Because that is when we are at our most vulnerable."
What vulnerabilities are exposed by a state's will to forget? As Louisa Lim has argued, the national forgetting of the events of June 4 are not merely a consequence of state suppression but also a collective amnesia. Forgetting has become a survival mechanism: "There is no benefit to remembering, so why bother?" Tiananmen Square offers one simple answer: because it happened, because we were there. In the novel's final act, the mode of narration shifts from self-confessed recollections ("what I remember most ..."; "when I look back on it ...") to present, declarative fact. The story is no longer presented as memories filtered through decades. The narrator speaks from 1989 with authority. Time dilates. Lai relates in vivid, concrete detail the rag-doll fall of the first line of students attacked by the People's Liberation Army, the methodical, emotionless movements of the soldiers. A foreign reporter asks Lai if she thinks anyone was killed, and she looks back at her in disbelief: "Of course. Many students were killed. I saw it with my own eyes."
The novel falters, however, when it works hardest to intervene against existing testimony. In the final act, Lai reveals that the protagonist's friend Anna -- a larger-than-life, cross-dressing leader of a theatrical troupe of student misfits -- was secretly Tank Man all along. This might be an interesting revelation if the text addressed any of the many existing debates about the fate and identity of Tank Man. Does the state know who he is? Was he imprisoned or executed? Was he a worker as opposed to a student? Does his anonymity contribute to his power? Is his iconicity a mere fantasy of Western democratic liberalism? Margaret Hillenbrand has argued persuasively that the fugitive afterlives of the figure at the center of the most enduring photograph of Beijing in 1989 are more illuminating of the suppressed memory of that year than the "farcically deracinated" original product of Western media. Yet Lai uncritically embraces that liberal icon as she drives home what she perceives to be the book's most important message, the "only lasting thing I can give you": "I knew that 'Tank Man' was in fact ... Tank Woman. And now you know that too."
This is an odd closing move, especially in a book that has otherwise made no strong statements about gender. In the epilogue, Lai Wen compounds the oddity by making some broad, sweeping attempts to tie the Tiananmen protests to a struggle in "the MeToo movement, in the fight to attain abortion rights, [and] in the struggle against rape and murder." But the inerasable fact of the student bravery of June 1989 is enough. The single image of Tank Man is enough. They do not need comparisons to a smorgasbord of contemporary struggles to matter.