Repaying the toil of previous generations

THREE BROTHERS: MEMORIES OF MY FAMILY by Yan Lianke

(Text Publishing, $38)

When he was in the People’s Army, Yan Lianke was fascinated by “the smell and solemnity of Chinese literary journals”. Then he read Gone With the Wind and became (improbably) besotted with Western literature.

His own writing was motivated at first by the hope of earning some money to pay for his father’s medical treatment back in their remote Henan Province village. That same modesty and filial devotion permeate his first non-fiction book to appear in English.

Yan grew up during the disastrous Cultural Revolution of the 1960s-70s. For him it meant years of squeezing poverty. The Red Guards were alien, invasive, almost irrelevant. His family — Mother, Father, Second Sister, Fourth Uncle and others — were the core of his world. Two of those uncles, plus his father, provide the title and focus of this affecting memoir.

He describes his father breaking stones to build homes for his extended family, even as his chronic asthma grew worse; his mother roasting potato skins for food and his sick elder sister being taken from clinic to clinic in a wheelbarrow.

Yan was the clever child. He flourished at school, in the perverse years when promotion depended on how many pages of Chairman Mao’s thoughts a student could recite by heart. He ached to escape to a more expansive life, even if it took the form of 16-hour shifts in a cement factory. Then came the army and swelling literary fame — until his narratives began offending party bureaucrats. “I had to spend six months writing self-criticisms.”

His family were fallible. One uncle was haunted by a death wish; another gambled and drank. But they underpinned his life with goodness and sacrifice, so it’s not surprising that this narrative should glow with such respect for all his elders. He works to repay them, often in the most domestic ways. The money from his debut novella went towards buying his parents their first (black-andwhite, 18-inch) television set.

Carlos Rojas’ translation makes a great job of rendering Yan’s remarkable images: “the red-andgreen sound of my sister crying” ... a bowl of soup “like sunlight on a winter morning” ... “the elderly go to the next world and lie down there, waiting for their children to follow”.

Three Brothers is a humbling book, in terms of the endurance and stoicism that flow through it. A heartening book too, suffused with quiet, unfailing love.