The RAS Book Club will meet to discuss English by Wang Gang.
On this occasion, members of the RAS Book Club will have the opportunity to discuss the book among themselves without the participation of the author, leaving the group free to pursue their own line of discussion and dialogue.Copies of the book will be available a discounted price of RMB 175 at RAS events prior to this meeting, and can be obtained by contacting the RAS Book Club at bookclub@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
N.B. RESERVATIONS ESSENTIAL AS SPACE IS LIMITED AT THIS EVENT.
ABOUT THE BOOK AND AUTHOR
In a remote village tucked away in north-western China, in the middle of Chairman Mao’s decimating reign, a young boy is falling in love – with women, with language, and with the mystery of adulthood. In Wang Gang’s novel English, the aptly named Love Liu tells the story of his coming of age in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, when a man with a book was the most dangerous figure imaginable.Love Liu’s world is constructed, literally and figuratively, by three great forces: his mother, his father, and Mao. The cavernous school he attends (when classes are not suspended for political reasons) was designed by his architect father. His mother, also an architect, is busy with plans for a bomb shelter that will make her the toast of the local Communist Party. And everywhere Love Liu goes, he is both menaced and comforted by the paintings, sayings and the songs of Chairman Mao. Into this carefully orchestrated, minutely supervised world comes an outsider, Second Prize Wang, the new English teacher at the school. Unlike the other adults in Love Liu’s life, Second
Prize Wang wears elegant suits and cologne, and his Shanghai ways give him the answers to Love Liu’s most pressing and secret questions about love and life.
While Love Liu and his schoolmates – the bright, troubled Sunrise Huang and the rowdy, impoverished Garbage Li – busy themselves with children’s games and gossip, they are not immune to the political crisis unfolding among their elders. All three are bound up in their parents’ troubles, and the combination of childlike logic and a paranoid society is deadly.
As Love Liu and Second Prize Wang begin to gather steam on a collision course with the culture of suspicion that surrounds them, Wang Gang reveals with precision and deep sympathy the effects of a totalitarian state on individual lives and minds.
Wang Gang is a critically acclaimed novelist and screenwriter in China. English is based on his experiences growing up in western China. He includes a bitter afterword about what the Cultural Revolution was really like. Murder, violence, and terror were everyday things in those days, he writes. But in English, the first of his novels to be translated into English, he has chosen to focus on “moments of tenderness and forgiveness.” It’s an incredible example of human resilience that Wang managed to survive and write this transcendent book. He lives in Beijing.