cover image Flowers for Mei-Ling

Flowers for Mei-Ling

Lorraine Lachs. Carroll & Graf Publishers, $24 (401pp) ISBN 978-0-7867-0414-9

Readers who like a multicharactered story with international settings and a reprise of pivotal moments of 20th-century history will appreciate Lach's engrossing debut novel. In the intriguing opening chapter, a widowed Canadian banker who travels to Amsterdam for an assignation meets Mei-Ling Wang, a high-class call girl. In addition to being beautiful, Mei-Ling is well-bred, intelligent and knowledgeable in the creative arts. Flashbacks to 1968 China reveal the trauma in Mei-Ling's life: sent with other Red Guards into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, she was the victim of a gang rape en route. Finally reunited with her English-born mother, who was once an idealistic Communist, as was her Chinese father (a professor), Mei-Ling is determined never to be powerless again. Her pragmatic decision to cooperate in her seduction by an unscrupulous Dutchman allows her to achieve financial security; but she is further disillusioned when she is pressed into service in his sex-for-hire business. Meanwhile, in other parts of the globe, people whose lives will mesh with Mei-Ling's are participating in or being affected by the revolutionary spirit of the times: notably an anti-Vietnam War protester in Chicago who flees to Canada. Lachs seems determined to touch on the major political upheavals of the last 50 years, and when her characters describe those events the narrative becomes didactic. But her insights into generational reactions--children of idealists become cynics, and the next generation swings back--are perceptive, and give an otherwise conventional story a deeper dimension. (July)