Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1454854 in Books
• Published on: 1994-10
• Original language: Mandarin Chinese
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 142 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In her first work of fiction since entering self-imposed exile, Chinese composer, playwright, author Liu has created a brilliant kaleidoscope drawn from colorful fragments of widely divergent worlds. Published in Hong Kong in 1991, this story of a London student haunted by youthful memories of Maoist Beijing, has not yet appeared in China. Liu's heroine, Huang Haha writes down her memories, a "ragbag of half-told stories, half-formed ideas and half-remembered incidents," which nonetheless seem more vivid and real than life in cold, gray, bland London. Following her father's death in custody, Haha's household was headed by her mother and "Auntie," a family friend who instilled in Haha a love of traditional Chinese opera, and quotations from these operas, along with nursery rhymes, revolutionary songs and Chinese and Western pop songs appear throughout. Haha, whose name is sometimes apt and sometimes bitterly ironic, tells humorous, often scatalogical tales about the perils of village latrines or friends who practiced loud and offensive cursing-seemingly the main criterion for membership in the Red Guards. In London, Haha lives for letters from her friends; copes with an uncommitted English boyfriend who already has a fiancee; and relies on Chinese women friends for companionship and understanding. This is a literate novel, rich with references to Chinese and Western literature, that asks how to preserve the soul of a civilization in the face of inexorable modernization and explores the divided consciousness of the individual expatriate.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In this novel, first published in Hong Kong in 1991, we meet a Chinese woman who is living in London and writing a novel based on her childhood during the Cultural Revolution, when even jump-rope songs had to keep current with the party line. Although her life as a loner in a strange country provide the framework for the novel, most of the action is set in her past in China. Huang Haha was born to a prominent family, whose circumstances have been reduced by her father's suicide. The reader follows young Haha and her girlfriends as they practice swear words to prove they're good enough to join the Red Guard, mature into young women with lovers and contraband pets, and constantly question everything along the way. Liu's work, yet to be published in China, offers an unusual glimpse into an unusual world. Recommended for Asian and women's studies collections.
Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Another strong voice in the publisher's Writers from Modern China series, Liu Sola's is practically fearless. Actually, she both adopts her heroine Huang Haha's persona to loosely tell in the first person a story of growing up during the Cultural Revolution and retreats to the third person to observe Haha as she writes of her childhood while now living as an adult in London. Haha's life in China seems to overshadow her present life, so the book flip-flops between absurd reminiscences--being allowed to join the Red Brigade only when at 11 she learns to swear really obscenely; her virgin Auntie being deemed the perfect woman by her village; her hilarious attempts to keep contraband house pets; meditations on the village outhouses and the use of night soil--and her rather colorless life in the West. Liu packs Haha's story with fascinating detail, but more compelling is her writing style--bold, confident, as artistically complex as a cubist painting or a jazz riff. She a is writer to watch. Mary Ellen Sullivan

Customer Reviews

An excellent short novel
The entire novel is only 126 pages long, and there's numerous short poems and snippets of songs interspersed throughout. The story itself is filled with that brutal rawness that defines modern literature. No fainting flowers or blushing virgins on these pages. The story follows two women: one a college student and the other a character in a novel the college student is writing. Both characters describe their lives in China during the cultural revolution, and the college student adds in thoughts about her life at a university in Europe. Even though politics and the surrounding culture(s) are integral to this story, at it's core are women. Women dealing with each other, relationships, children, sex, family expectations, pets, school, government, and life in a mad and (sometimes) dangerous world.

A brief novel, but a good one.
What's particularly interesting about Chaos And All That is how Sola Liu takes a wickedly humorous approach to describe growing up during China's Cultural Revolution, which is unlike anything I've ever read about that period.

Revealing.
This is an excellent little book. Not for the squeamish. It's half in-your-face reality and half poetic silliness. I liked it. Not unlike Catcher in the Rye.