The Sweep of History

Belle Yang returns to the lore of her father's homeland

FROM THE ODYSSEY OF A MANCHURIAN
Belle Yang's newest novel is illustrated throughout with her vibrant and eclectic paintings and drawings.

By Linda Li

In her second novel, The Odyssey of a Manchurian, author Belle Yang revisits the ground she explored in her previous book, Baba: A Return to China upon My Father's Shoulders. She explains her connection to this source material in her introduction: "To understand my parent is to make sense of the past, see it linked to my own belly like an umbilical cord, even as I see the future emanate from my own breath." Baba (Mandarin for "dad") collected various childhood memories of her father, Joseph Yang, the fourth son of a declining Manchurian family amid the chaos of China in the 1930s and '40s. Odyssey chronicles 19-year-old Baba's perilous flight south.

Starting from home in the northern province of Manchuria, Baba struggles to escape the bitter contest between the Communists and Nationalists as well as the surveillance and treachery infecting the country. This epic journey leads him through Beijing and Shanghai and finally to Taiwan.

Yang structures each chapter so that each leg of Baba's odyssey evokes a memory or anecdote from his childhood. Sometimes, as when the tales of earlier days contrast strange new changes sweeping the country, this is an effective device.

For instance, when Baba seeks shelter with two elderly peasants, he discovers that portraits of Mao Zedong and Zhu De have replaced the traditional print of the Kitchen God and his wife above the stove, as part of Communist "liberation" orders. This triggers strong memories of Baba's special entreaty one spring to the deity and his wife, who together guard the hearth and prosperity of every household, and annually report on the righteousness of each family to the Emperor of Heaven.

Baba's recollections emphasize the contrast between his childhood days, when all he had to worry about was the petty authoritarian dictates of his Fourth Uncle, and the current situation, in which Mao and Zhu aspire to assume the Kitchen God's survey of each home across China.

Yang chooses to tell Baba's story primarily in the third person with occasional first-person narration and dialogue. She does not, however, consistently distinguish between impressions belonging to the youthful Baba, the mature father reflecting upon his past, the daughter ruminating on her roots, or information gleaned from a history book.

The indeterminate storytelling voice, which also never seems to develop nuances or change character, may well be responsible for the tendency of Yang's stories-within-stories to lose their sense of time and blur into one another. The varying age of Baba's voice is also important since Yang sees her father not only as an extension of her own history, but also "he who talks for a long chain of others: the voiceless, the overlooked, those who have disappeared in the tumult of time without a murmur." Given this weighty mission, the flat, static characterization of the narrator cannot quite do justice to the vast landscape and range of people Baba encounters.

Compared with her exuberant paintings, Yang's prose can at times seem stilted. Both demonstrate a fondness for broad pictorial strokes and dense patterning. Her art confidently draws upon Chinese folk arts' rich traditions of paper cuts and wood block prints to create a personal expression that is lavish, colorful, and exuberant. Yang appears to have distilled the diverse blend of artistic styles exhibited in the illustrations of Baba to a coherent visual language for Odyssey. However, her writing cannot match her artwork's compelling organizational focus and movement.

In her earlier book, one can sense Yang's excitement and sense of discovery as she writes and paints an accumulation of details, anecdotes, and lore-indeed piggybacking on her father's memories. By comparison, her approach to the subject matter of Odyssey is less successful-perhaps Baba's character cannot bear the weight of her narration for such a monumental course of action.

On the other hand, Yang does, once again, prove generous with details of food and scenery. She delivers a rich mix of folk superstition, shifting cultures, wartime history, and family politics embellished with picturesque imagery and Chinese onomatopoeia. At these moments, her love and admiration for her father's spirit and endurance shine through.

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