ISBN: 978071180416 [UK]
Continent: Asia
Country: China
Title: Miss Chopsticks
Author: Xue Xinran
Translator: Esther Tyldesley
"Three was absolutely determined that this would not happen to her. After all, hadn't her father 'taken' her mother—and look what had become of her. It was as if he had gone out and brought back a tool to have children, make clothes, cook, do the housework, raise the pigs, feed the dogs, and endure injustice and hardship. If wanting a man meant that kind of life, Three would gladly do without one" (page 167).
In the rural Chinese village where Three grows up, women are referred to as "chopsticks"—ultilitarian, easily breakable things—while men are the strong "roofbeams" that hold up a house. Three's parents have six daughters and no sons, a situation that has brought ridicule on their family from the other villagers. The sisters are worth so little that their names are only numbers corresponding to the order in which they were born.
With her eldest sister already married off, and Two dead—having committed suicide rather than suffer the same fate—Three is desperate for a way out. When a sympathetic uncle helps her run away to the nearest large city, Nanjing, Three is determined to show her father that even a chopstick can support a house.
A year later, Three returns to the village for the Spring Festival, apprehensive about seeing her father. But when her parents see the amount of money she has saved up over a year of waitressing, they allow her to take her sisters Five and Six back with her to the city to look for work.
The transition to city life isn't a smooth one—the sisters have never ridden in a car before, or seen a computer or cell phone (though the book is set in the early 2000s). Five can neither read nor write, though Six is a little better off, having finished middle school. Five ends up working in a "water culture center"—a medicinal bathhouse where she lives in a dormitory with the other bathhouse assistants. Six, unusually for a country girl, is a great lover of books, and finds work in the family-run Book-Taster's Teahouse, a book cafe where she lives with an intellectual family. The novel follows the lives of all three sisters as they navigate the wonderful, frightening, confusing world of the city, and try to reconcile two wildly different ways of life.
I love this book! The characters are believable and endearing. I love how different the sisters are, and yet how they all face similar challenges. I found myself inwardly cheering as Five discovered a hidden talent for getting the bathhouse pools just right; as Six improved her English by talking with foreign students in the teahouse, resolving to educate herself and someday attend university.
The book gives a good sense of modern Chinese history, with references to the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao, and the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, and it does a good job of describing how these events affected ordinary Chinese citizens.
Miss Chopsticks flows well, and has a lovely mix of humor, pain, hope, and poignancy. The chapters are short, but packed with interesting description that gives a wonderful sense of place as well as insight into the hearts of the three main characters.
In short, this book made me feel warm in my heart.
Five stars out of five.
This book sounds really interesting. I think I'll look into it. :3
ReplyDeleteI'm curious though, you mentioned every sister but Four. What happened to her?
I love this book! I cannot recommend it highly enough :)
ReplyDeletePoor Four! She's deaf and dumb, so she has to stay in the village with her miserable mother and father. I felt so bad for her (I know she's fictitious, but still!).