Peach Blossom Spring
On the face of it, Melissa Fu’s debut novel follows three generations of the Dao family between 1938 and 2005 as they collectively (and rather circuitously) journey from China’s Hunan Province through to New York, and from prosperity, to migrant and refugee status, to multicultural citizens of a globalised world – all of which states are variously problematic. Many of the histories it engages with along the way – from the devastating destruction of the Second Sino-japanese War and then China’s Civil War through the White Terror in Taiwan, to the legacies of Mccarthyism and Tiananmen Square 1989 – have been widely covered in fiction and nonfiction in recent years, producing, at times, the sense that it is more than literally treading old (but nevertheless painful) ground.
Where the novel truly comes to life, however, is when it reaches the near present, with characters burdened by a sense of belonging to places that no longer exist, connected to people whose languages they no longer speak. Indeed its primary theme, which builds through the family’s constant shedding (in turns by compulsion and choice) of one life for the next, is one that speaks to the status of immigrant and refugee communities everywhere: how much of the person you are today is the product of the people and cultures that came before? Or as the author puts it, what do you do when your logic of survival means that ‘facing any one way means turning your back on another’?
It’s appropriate – as each character’s past in turn attains the status of legend – that the book draws its title and most of its more poetic thematics from a fifth-century fable by Tao Yuanming, in which a fisherman stumbles across a utopia hidden behind a forest of peach trees and a rocky grotto (the title, Tao Hua Yuan, has since become a standard term for utopia) that you can leave but never return to. And that it’s the tale’s various retellings that form a thread connecting one generation to the next. One way of looking at all this is that nothing ever changes; the other is that life is a process of coming to terms with constant change. Whichever path you chose, Fu offers an emotional yet elegant ride.
Nirmala Devi