cover image Come Watch the Sun Go Home

Come Watch the Sun Go Home

Wai-Fah Chen. Marlowe & Company, $22.95 (252pp) ISBN 978-1-56924-742-6

Chen begins her remarkable memoir of post-WWII China with a description of her family watching the ""sun go home"" at dusk in California, where they fled during the Sino-Japanese War. The family returned in the early 1950s to find that China had become an unstable home, even less hospitable after Mao's Cultural Revolution. Although Chen (a pseudonym, as is the name of her freelance coauthor) relates her story chronologically, with little stylistic embellishment, she delivers a powerful tale. Ordinary experiences, like sleeping above hot water pipes in a strange village, are juxtaposed with horrific encounters. She summarizes what happened when she talked loosely about a government official, was apprehended for it, then was beaten and starved for four months in solitary confinement with her three-month-old daughter. She later spent seven years in a reform camp being ""re-educated."" In 1989, while back in the U.S., Chen commented on the Tiananmen Square massacre in an interview and once again became an ""enemy"" of her birthplace, destined never to return. Despite the destruction of her family and her country, her forgiveness is surprisingly graceful. She excuses those who beat her, maintaining that in an ideological war, everyone is a victim. She longs to return to China and expresses gratitude that her children survived the Tiananmen incident. This tone of empathy and compassion, coupled with her perspective on China's political events, makes Chen's work memorable. (June)