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Three Sisters, by Bi Feiyu
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In a small village in China, the Wang family has produced seven sisters in its quest to have a boy; three of the sisters emerge as the lead characters in this remarkable novel. From the small-town treachery of the village to the slogans of the Cultural Revolution to the harried pace of city life, Bi Feiyu follows the women as they strive to change the course of their destinies and battle against an “infinite ocean of people” in a China that does not truly belong to them. Yumi will use her dignity, Yuxiu her powers of seduction, and Yuyang her ambition—all in an effort to take control of their world, their bodies, and their lives.
Like Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, and J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Three Sisters transports us to and immerses us in a culture we think we know but will understand much more fully by the time we reach the end. Bi’s Moon Opera was praised by the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and other publications. In one review Lisa See said: “I hope this is the first of many of Bi’s works to come to us.” Three Sisters fulfills that wish, with its irreplaceable portrait of contemporary Chinese life and indelible story of three tragic and sometimes triumphant heroines.
- Sales Rank: #1454948 in Books
- Published on: 2010-12-01
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 310 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. With a mercilessly satirical eye, Bi (The Moon Opera) observes domestic and communal life in late 20th-century China as three of the seven daughters of Wang Lianfang strive for identity and self-respect. In 1971, when serial philanderer Wang is finally caught, he loses his job and the family loses face. Yumi, his eldest daughter, is forsaken by her fiancé and becomes the second wife to an older man in a nearby town. This is a step up, but her new home is no less a hothouse of gossip and suspicion. The third sister, beautiful Yuxiu, follows Yumi with big hopes that are derailed by an unexpected pregnancy. A decade later, youngest sister Yuyang is poised to escape a dreary fate when she's accepted by a school in Beijing, but she, too, has heartbreak in store. Bi describes with a sober bluntness the coarse brutality and familial and community power jockeying that plays out in villages where life is governed by strict rituals, superstition, and folk beliefs. Drawn with dispassionate candor, this is a bleak tale of human miseries and of women struggling to survive in a culture that devalues them. (Aug.)
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From Booklist
Set in China in the 1970s and 1980s, Bi’s novel follows three sisters from a small village. Yumi, Yuxiu, and Yuyang are three of the seven daughters of a lecherous Communist Party secretary who spends more time bedding other men’s wives than he does working. Disgusted by her father’s affairs, eldest daughter Yumi plots her escape through marriage. Her romance with a young aviator ends after two of her sisters are raped, leading Yumi to seek out a marriage with a much older government official. She’s perturbed when her beautiful, seductive younger sister Yuxiu, her reputation ruined after her rape, follows her to her new home and ingratiates herself with the sullen daughter of Yumi’s husband, Guo Jiaxing. The rivalry between the two sisters comes to a head when Yuxiu and Guo’s adult son fall in love. Though the novel loses steam in the final section, which focuses on the youngest sister Yuyang’s exploits at a teacher-training school, this is an involving look at the difficulties of women’s lives in Communist China. --Kristine Huntley
Review
San Francisco Chronicle, Top Shelf, Recommended Reading
PRI's "The World" Book Recommendations from Afar
MAN ASIA PRIZE WINNER
"A moving exploration of Chinese family and village life during the Cultural Revolution, that moves seamlessly between the epic and the intimate, the heroic and the petty, illuminating not only individual lives but an entire society, within a gripping tale of familial conflict and love." – Man Asia Literary Prize
"Engaging . . . [Three Sisters] documents in palpably human terms the low value accorded the lives of women in China and the deep divide in that country between rural and urban areas. . . . This is a China that few Westerners know. Bi Feiyu makes it real and believable in this charming, surprising novel." —Washington Post Book World
"Charming . . . An eye-opening read for anyone curious about the Cultural Revolution, the mores of the families struggling to survive in China’s small villages, and the lives of the seemingly sexless women who labored so stoically in their Mao jackets." —Worlds Book Review, PRI’s "The World"
"Yumi’s story in particular imparts the flavor of a time and place alien to us, the waning years of the Cultural Revolution in a crude farming village." —Boston Globe
"Bi's compelling and unsentimental book...draws a meticulous picture of a transitioning village in '70s China, and in so doing, Bi has created memorable characters. . . . Despite the cruelty and suffering, there is hope in Bi's book, which lies mainly in the three young women's defiance of life's privations and their determination to find a new future for themselves against all odds. In this sense, they transcend their depressing conditions and, ultimately, inspire the reader." —San Francisco Chronicle
"A stunning portrayal of women's lives in China." —Socialist Review
"Bi Feiyu, one of China's most distinguished writers, tells the captivating story of three sisters and the challenges they face in modern China. A vivid portrayal of the differences between country and city life." —CultureCritic
"A complex moral tale that also illuminates the country's rise from sleeping tiger to global power. . . . human spirit is complex and the real moral of the tale, Bi slyly suggests, is that there will be a price to pay for China's awakening." —Independent (UK)
"With a mercilessly satirical eye, Bi observes domestic and communal life in late 20th-century China as three of the seven daughters of Wang Lianfang strive for identity and self-respect." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Bi Feiyu delivers a moving tale of three sisters struggling to take control of their lives in the years after the Cultural Revolution. Their heroic endurance of petty cruelties and unfair obstacles feels universal for the time and place, yet Bi brilliantly traces this widespread societal pain back to its source, deep in human nature--then shows how it is passed from one individual life to another. A profound, illuminating novel." --Nicole Mones, author of The Last Chinese Chef and Lost in Translation
"Bi Feiyu has crafted a macabre yet empathetic tapestry out of the lives of three sisters amidst the byzantine webs of revolutionary sexism during the Cultural Revolution. He leads us through China’s equivalents of the scarlet letter, reminding us that the legacy of women as second place remains an unacknowledged undertow, and giving the reader compelling insights within a spell-binding tale of love and hatred, defeat and victory, resignation and redemption." —William Poy Lee, author of The Eighth Promise
"One of China's best contemporary novelists, Bi Feiyu has created an insightful portrait of China during the past half a century with a tale both epic and intimate. Three Sisters is an important novel." —Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
"A thrilling family epic that depicts China's dispossessed longings and love." —Xiaolu Guo, author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
More Like Three Novellas Than a Novel
By Fairbanks Reader - Bonnie Brody
Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu is a tragicomic novel, a tongue-in-cheek parody, about three sisters in the Wang family living in Wang Family Village in rural China. "Many rural villages are populated mainly by families with the same surname ." The novel opens in 1971 and ends in 1982. It is structured like three novellas though it is described by the publisher as a novel. The book's strength, and also its weakness, is that it is primarily comprised of character studies without a lot of plot. This can make it less accessible to some readers. Throughout the novel, the author utilizes Chinese proverbs, aphorisms and adages to make points. It comes out sounding something like a Greek chorus, adding a comic element to what is often heart-rending or calamitous. It is also very culture-specific which makes it harder to access for many readers.
The background is Maoist China following the Cultural Revolution. The position of women is lowly. They have no say in their lives except through subtle avenues where they can make small choices that may have a large impact on their lives and those in their community. This is often achieved by how a salutation is given, who is addressed and who is ignored, and what gossip is spread among them.
The book opens in 1971 with the story of Yumi, the oldest sister in the Wang family. The family is comprised of seven daughters and one son. Yumi's mother has given up the care of her son to Yumi who takes her brother around the village with pride as though she were his mother. In essence, she is the head of her family. Her father is a philanderer and a drunk who has the job of commune-secretary. He falls from grace when an affair he is having with the wife of an active duty soldier comes to light. This impacts Yumi's marriage plans. She had been engaged to an aviator from a neighboring town but he pulls out of the engagement because of Yumi's father's disgrace. Yumi is a strong woman who has plans - she wants to be associated with power. She manages to become the second wife to a powerful man in another village. Though her heart is broken and she is filled with embarrassment and shame, she proceeds with her life, giving the appearance of "one of those intrepid women in propaganda posters, a woman who could charm any man and still look death in the face without flinching."
The second part of the book is about the third daughter,Yuxio. Yuxio is a flirt and is described as cunning and two-faced, like a fox or a snake. She and Yumi have never gotten along and she has never respected Yumi's authority. After her father's downfall, she goes to attend a movie and during the course of the film she is abducted and raped. Yumi does her best to help her maintain face in the village but is soon gone off with her husband to a new town. On top of the shame associated with the rape, Yuxio gets into a fight with one of her younger sisters that is observed by many in the village. The outcome of this fight is that Yuxio becomes a village outcast.
Yuxio leaves her village and travels to Yumi's home where she seductively entrenches herself into the good graces of Yumi's stepdaughter and husband. The next thing Yumi knows, Yuxio is living with her family. There is already a wedge between Yumi and her stepdaughter and this is widened by Yuxio.. Though Yuxio actually despises the girl, she fawns and acts obsequiously towards her. Yuxio tries to install herself into the good graces of various town folk but over and over she sabotages herself by her indiscreet and false pretenses. It doesn't take long for others to catch on to her back stabbing personality. Yumi becomes pregnant and Yuxio loses her power at home. By the end of this section Yuxio is in much worse shape than when she started. She has ended up fooling nobody, not even herself.
The third chapter in the novel is about Yuyang, seventh sister, and takes place in 1982. Yuyang has won a scholarship to a teaching college and gets involved in the intrigue of the school, working on underground intelligence. This consists primarily of keeping an eye on her fellow students and teachers to see who is fraternizing with whom and reporting these events to her superior. She has read a lot of Agatha Christie and feels up to the job.
The novel ends without pulling together the lives of the three sisters. There is no follow-up to the other two stories and no real connecting of them. That is why I consider this book to be comprised of novellas rather than considering it a novel. I think this book might appeal to readers who are familiar with Chinese literature and culture. It is not likely to have widespread appeal because of stylistic issues. I found it informative and interesting, at times laugh at loud funny, but I am sure that there is a lot here that went past me.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Cocktail of the chairman mao revolution, chinese society and the women in it
By Sincerely Yours
A very adult rated book that explores human lust, sexual awareness blooming in young adults, the intricacy of the Chinese culture of your standing in society marred by the stance of the Chinese revolution under Chairman Mao. Although the exact period is not spelt out in the novel, but you get a sense the people's revolution has been in place for a while, late 70's to early 80's, where the story follows one family, the Wang family, and the story really explores in depth the three of seven daughters: Yumi: the eldest, the one who had the responsibility of looking after the family and siblings and how her quick mind maneuvered to ensure the family's face is saved in on so many occasions because of her father's wondering eyes and her third sister who shared the same `wild' genes; Yuxiu: the third daughter who is her father's favorite daughter has to deal with the humiliation of an event that is considered a big no-no for Chinese girls, and then having to show humiliation when she escapes to live with Yumi, who has resurrected her life as a married woman to a senior general. Then you have the seventh daughter (7 girls and the 8th was the boy), Yuying: who managed to be blessed to have none of the responsibilities of her older sisters and was able to attend an elite school for budding teachers. Her tale follows her through the communist part approach to loyalty to the party, the need to sneak on each other that lead to the discovery of a relationship between student and teacher!
I am not sure whether it was the intention of the author to depict how women are treated in Chinese society as third class citizens or whether it reflects his unconscious thought due to his own up bringing? The treatment of women certainly comes across as being quite harsh, but descriptive to be interesting to read about their struggles and how they view themselves in a male dominated society and the importance of a male child to carry on the family name. this novel is not so dated in that it is that far removed from what is still happening in today's society. An interesting read.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Great start, lousy finish
By Cathe
This book tells the stories of three sisters in a Chinese family of seven sisters and one brother. The story of Yumi, the eldest sister was great. She was such an interesting character who took a stand against her father's philandering. This section of the book brought in the family dynamics and really showed how the village worked which was hilarious. That section gets 5 stars. The second section was about the third sister, Yuxio, who after being gang raped, wants to escape the gossip of the village. This portion was not quite as complelling but still enjoyable and the family connection continued. Four stars for that one.
The last section about the sister who went to teachers' school was like a completely different book. The family and other sisters was not referenced at all, but the part that bothered me most was that the book just stopped. By that I mean, it didn't 'end' it just stopped. I looked for the next page, the next paragraph but that was it. Totally abrupt. No tie in to the rest of the book. No hint of a wrap up. Like the author got interrupted in his writing and never came back.
I was also a little confused how or why he picked these three sisters out of the seven to choose from and what about the brother. It didn't make sense to me that the other siblings were barely mentioned. Were these three sisters more interesting than the rest? Why even have the other sisters if you're just going to ignore them--just make the family have three sisters.
In conclusion, I enjoyed the writing in the book and the individiual stories . . . I just didn't think they were put together right for a book. Either take out the third section or tie it in to the rest . . . and give us stories of all the siblings. But the main reason I gave this three stars was because of the infuriating ending . . . or I just say the infuriating lack of an ending.
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