4.5 stars
My Fair Concubine by Jeannie Lin was a delightful Pygmalion story set in Tang Dynasty China.
Fei Long's sister Pearl has been given the honour of being a heqin bride, women of the royal family or court who are sent to rulers on the Empire's borders in marriage alliances. Unfortunately for Fei Long, Pearl's eloped with another man, and his family honour is on the line unless he can find another woman to take her place.
Enter Yan Ling, a servant in a small-town teahouse. Her meet cute with Fei Long has her throwing a pot of tea over him because she thinks he is propositioning her. She's let go from her position, so Fei Long agrees to take her to Changan and train her as a replacement heqin for Pearl. But that necessitates the two of them spending a lot of time together. Fei Long begins to admire Yan Ling's determination, and Yan Ling isn't sure what to so with her feelings for the gruff man of the house.
The characters were the real highlight of My Fair Concubine and gave me so many feels. Fei Long was such a vulnerable hero, with so much responsibility on his shoulders. Yan Ling and her/Pearl's lady's maid, Dao, are - excuse me for using the dreaded phrase - such strong female characters. Yan Ling is caught in no man's land; she's not Fei Long's servant, but neither is she his equal, despite the fact that she is masquerading as his sister and will eventually receive the honorary title of princess. She's having to forge forward without any template as to her status or behaviour, and not be discouraged by Fei Long's constant nit-picking. As a servant, Dao will never have the opportunity to marry, and she is outspoken if her belief that Yan Ling is jeopardising her chance at a better life by falling for Fei Long, whose status means he will probably only dally with her, or - at best - make her a concubine.
Yan Ling's low birth also provided My Fair Concubine with a different focus to the other books in Lin's Tang Dynasty series, and different insights into life in Imperial China around 800 AD.
I could see the way one complication was going to resolved a mile away, but the mystery was in how the romantic arc was going to get the characters to that conclusion. Throughout the novel, Fei Long is very concerned over his good family name, which is endangered by Pearl's elopement and his father's debts and which also puts his lifelong family retainers at risk. I kept turning pages obsessively to see what the catalyst would be that cause him to believe that his feelings for Yan Ling were more or equally important than his family honour. This catalyst did come as a surprise, and an emotional one at that.
Lin has consistently delivered with this series, but I found this one to be particularly satisfying.
The Long March Remembered was very short and very basic introduction to Communist China's founding myth, the Long March. The information provided was good, but it almost felt like the author was constrained by a word count or something. He'd touch on something really interesting for a page, and then flit on to the next thing. Nonetheless, starting with a base knowledge of a) the Long March happened and b) it had something to do with the Communist Party and the Civil War, this book helped fill in the blanks.
Nominally, The Long March Remembered looks at the differences between the official, founding myth of Communist China, the historical record (what little there is of it) and oral and physical sources. It throws up some interesting contradictions in the process, but they are only dealt with very superficially.
Another focus of Stourton's is how the historical representation of the Long March has been constructed from the top down, with the focus on its significance for Mao Zedong, the Party and the brewing Civil War, rather than centralising the experience of the everyday men and women in the Red Army.
He relates some personal stories that are heart-rending: the female soldiers who were left barren because of the toll the March took on their bodies, families who never found out the fate of their loved ones, marchers who were so hungry that they would search through faeces for pieces of undigested grain. However, once again, he doesn't really delve into these stories very deeply, almost as though they are incidental to his main point (although his main point is supposedly how the Average Joe is forgotten in The Long March mythology, so that's a bit of a problem).
Supposedly, the reason so little personal history is included is due to a lack of sources, since the Marchers were mostly illiterate, and are now almost all deceased. But one of the most interesting parts of the whole book was Stourton's discussion with the child of two veterans of the March, who retells her parents' experiences. I would have liked to see more of this intergenerational reminescence and memory, especially to see how these families reconcile the 'official' version of the March with what they have heard from their parents or other family members. Or, if their parents didn't speak about it, as many people don't after such things, to what extent the spectre of the March was present in their upbringing anyway.
Ultimately, I think The Long March Remembered was trying to do too many things in too little space. But, because it glancingly covers so many disparate aspects of the March and the Civil War, it is useful as a primer.
