February Flowers - Fan Wu
Find The Cheapest Flights to China
Book China Hotels - Up To 70% Off!
Get the Travelhappy RSS feed for more info like this. Thanks for visiting!
Fan Wu's debut novel February Flowers is a deeply compelling coming of age story, centred around two female university students in Guangzhou, China.
Narrated by protagonist Chen Ming, which means "Morning Bright", readers are introduced to a nation and a people in flux. China in 1991 was caught up in the tensions and conflicts between its past and future. The paranoid control-freakish legacy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution was replaced with the vision of a new China, where economic reforms spurred on by the belief that "to be rich is glorious" created schisms between the nation's former proletarian ideology and its newfound lust for capitalist individualism.
Thoughts, actions and beliefs that 10 years previously would have led to a life of misery and hard labour in China's exterior, were now being encouraged as essential attributes for building the new economy. For those haunted by the state-sponsored social atomisation of the past, this chance to move forwards, to start over again, was a godsend.
However, the failure to reconcile the past left an emotional paralysis in its wake, and it is in part this mass-psychological morass, the threads intertwine with the fabric of everyday life, that Fan Wu explores in her debut offering.
Chen Ming herself is an archetype example of how this emotional frigidity and constipated parent-child relationships continues to penetrate her early adult life. Having spent much of her childhood growing up on a farm in southern China, where her schoolteacher parents were sent for "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution, she becomes the vessel through which her mother and father attempt to relive their missed opportunities in life. Discussions and letters purely focus on her academic achievements.
Nevertheless, Guangzhou University provides the seventeen year old with her first opportunity of liberation when she unintentionally meets Miao Yan on an abandoned rooftop. A stark contrast to nerdish Chen Ming, the 24-year old final year student from the ethnic Miao tribes of China's south, is beautiful, wild and completely aware of her sexuality. Miao Yan's extrovert personality grates with Chen Ming's prudish sensibilities to start with, but the two eventually hit it off and embark on a friendship so intense that it leaves readers with a real sense of yearning to physically experience such a deep, and ultimately nihilistic, relationship.
February Flowers does contain some of the stereotypes one would expect -- Chen Ming starts to skip lectures to hang out with her newfound friend, who conversely enjoys spending time with the one person who gives her credit for feeling real human emotions, rather than being considered to be simply an airhead who's an easy lay – but the story goes well beyond the typical good-girl meets naughty-girl coming of age fable.
"On the surface they're day and night, but deep down they're similar. They're very different from the people around them," Fan Wu tells the Bangkok Post, speaking from her California home. "They're very eager to know about themselves. They live in the complex of their past and their future. They want something better for themselves, and they find what they need in each other – a kind of sincerity and authentic emotion."
Inspired to write the novel after moving to the United States in 1997, Fan Wu first put pen to paper in 2001. Determined to write a book that countered the trend of misery memoirs, historical tales of concubines, and the louder, over-exaggerated Chinese fiction of the new millennium, she dedicated herself to creating a narrative that explored China's emotional landscape in depth.
Like Chen Ming, Fan Wu herself grew up on a farm in China's south with her exiled schoolteacher parents. However, despite drawing on these experiences to create an authentic back-story for her key character, she says that's where the autobiographical aspect of the book ends.
"I'm too young to write an autobiography. Also, other people's interests are a lot more interesting than my own," she says. "I just wanted to present a certain experience, it's a very universal topic, coming-of-age, and growing up, but it's in a very restrained culture in China in a particular period.
"I really felt for that generation. Most of the time they cannot have an open relationship with their parents of their teachers, so they have to depend on their friends to find out who they really are, what the world is really like, because your other communication channels are totally blocked."
Guangzhou -- with its bright lights, urban excitement and big bucks to be earned – might as well be a different country when compared to the small village in southern China that Miao Yan comes from. As her final year draws to an end, she becomes desperate to stay in the city, but only the select graduates who've toed the party line, achieved good results and avoided "immoral behaviour" are granted residence permits. The rest must return to their place of origin.
Miao Yan becomes increasingly desperate as she realises she is destined to go back to her village and her hidden shame from the past. As her behaviour becomes more erratic, the deep, plutonic friendship with Chen Ming, which at times barely skirted becoming sexual, starts to burn out.
"They have to face the past, but on the other hand they want to forget the past," says Fan Wu. "When I was a teenager, everyday I wanted to break free. Why did I have to shoulder so many burdens from the past? Why couldn't I just grow up thinking about my future and being carefree?"
For the author, China's need to reconcile its past is an essential part of it being able to move on. "This past 20 or 30 years China has gone through so many changes. This is a country that is so eager to move forward. In a way that is the hidden message in this book, that whether you like it or not you are moving forward, you cannot go back. "But you just have to reach reconciliation. You can't forget things forever. I feel this whole momentum in China these days. We have to understand the past to move forwards, but it is often too painful."
You can February Flowers online at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Greg Lowe is General Manager of International Media at B2S Thailand. This review first appeared in the Bangkok Post.
Other Travelhappy stories of interest:
- China Inc.: The Relentless Rise of the Next Great Superpower
- Hong Kong Lost Laundry
- China’s Speciality Penis Restaurant
- AirAsia Now Flying to Yangon, Myanmar (Burma)
- Bangkok Airport Not Re-Opening on November 29th
