Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Ye Xin, Giramondo Publishing, $29.95.
An engaging novel, Ye Xin writes with surprising directness and a psychological insight about a sliver of recent history.
More than 14 million Chinese high school graduates were sent from the cities to live and work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. They were known as zhiqing – ‘educated youth’. In the late 1970s the policy changed and they were allowed to return, but not their families. Many jumped at the opportunity, leaving spouses and children behind. A decade later the children, now teenagers, return to the cities to look for their parents.
Educated Youth ‘follows five such children, who have travelled across China from a province in the south-west to Shanghai in the east, only to discover that their mothers and fathers have remarried, and have new families, in which there is no room for them’.
Struggling to come to terms with their sense of love and duty, their comeback brings out the worst and the best in the parents.
