San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Girl navigates Mao’s China in new classic
Before I start talking about Chronicle columnist Vanessa Hua’s captivating sophomore novel, “Forbidden City,” I need to make sure you and I are on the same page about historical fiction. Specifically, I need you to abandon your associations with the genre — fusty prose, extraneous facts, antediluvian costume dramas — to make room for a new classic about China’s Cultural Revolution and the twilight years of Mao Zedong’s regime.
If you know nothing about 20th century Chinese history going into “Forbidden City,” worry not. Hua cleverly chooses Mei Xiang, “Little Plum Blossom,” to be her first-person narrator and reader proxy. Mei, a naive teenage girl plucked seemingly at random from her famine-stricken village, arrives at the Lake Palaces outside of Beijing when the novel opens. She’s been offered a coveted position with the official dance troupe of Chairman Mao (referred to solely as the Chairman in the novel), a role that will bring honor (and maybe food) to her family. “You’re just as important as a guard protecting the border,” Mei’s teacher explains to the girls during one rehearsal. “You’re protecting the cadre from themselves.” Which makes sense to Mei, kind of — her belief in the Chinese Communist Party has been nurtured since birth. Between learning the foxtrot, Mei learns to fend off homesickness, mean girls and groping advances from the Chairman’s cadre, all in the name of patriotism. Her fealty is shaken after the aging Chairman essentially rapes her after the first dance, but re-establishes itself when he takes Mei to his private quarters and under his wing. Though Hua started “Forbidden City” 15 years ago, according to her author’s note, its depiction of coercion and consent in the halls of power seems eerily relevant.
To be clear, however, “Forbidden City” is so much more than an historically minded #MeToo narrative. Though Mao did love to ballroomdance with young girls, and one of his “confidential clerks” was only 18, Hua’s novel is ultimately not about Mao; it’s about Mei and what happens to her and her country when the man behind the myth starts to come apart at the seams. (Think “Succession,” but add death and mayhem to the palace intrigue.)
Eventually, through perceptiveness and guile, Mei ends up in a pivotal role at the onset of the Cultural Revolution. Yet the cognitive dissonance between hero Chairman and human Chairman grows too loud for her to bear. Her private disillusionment coincides with the Cultural Revolution’s public cruelty. Face-to-face with its violence, Mei understands with horror that she and millions of others had been “sacrificed not for our country, as we’d believed, but for the Chairman.”
Historical fiction, at its best, is a visceral, not academic, enterprise. It provides dual pleasures to the reader: the pleasure of time travel and the pleasure of time’s echo. It’s one thing to know intellectually that history repeats itself and another to see history enacted through a well-crafted, defamiliarizing narrative. The echoes I heard in “Forbidden City” — narcissistic leadership, a revenge-thirsty body politic, women and girls treated as things — both unsettled and compelled me to consider the present anew. I can think of no higher praise for this ambitious and impressive novel.