From the book cover:The Long March Home tells the story of three generations of women. Agnes, a young Canadian, goes to China as a missionary and falls in love with a Chinese medical student. Growing anti-western sentiment forces her to return home to Nova Scotia, where she discovers she is pregnant. Meihua, their American-born daughter, travels to China in search of the father she never met and winds up marrying a Chinese man, but the Cultural Revolution tears their lives apart. With both parents imprisoned, it falls to the family's illiterate servant, Yao, to shield their daughter, Yezi, and her brother from family tragedy, poverty and political discrimination, negotiating their survival during the revolution she barely understands. Only after her mother is released, does Yezi learn about her foreign grandmother, Agnes. Curious about her ancestry, Yezi travels to the U.S. to meet Agnes and learn about her life in China with the man her mother still longs to find.
My Review:
The Long March Home has the skeletal outline of what could have been an epic story about three generations of women. Unfortunately it all falls flat.
Meihua narrators the first half of the story, which opens with her telling her husband, Lon, that she is pregnant with their third third child. The couple wonder whether it is wise to bring another child into the world in their situation. Lon is an ex-convict (it's hinted that his crime was political but that's never confirmed) and Meihua is half-American so there is concern that negative stigma will ruin their unborn child's life. Their oldest son, Dahai, was recently assigned to a mediocre high school, despite having the grades required for the best school in the area.
When the child, Yezi, is two years old, Meihua is arrested on charges of sabotaging the Cultural Revolution and sentenced to 13 years in jails. During Meihua incarceration, Yezi takes over the narration. Yezi's narration starts as the perspective of a six-year-old girl and continues to the end of the novel when she is a 15-year-old living with her maternal grandmother in Boston. Towards the end, the story seems very pro-western ideals. Yezi likes the freedom that life in a America provides and questions why anyone would want to go back to China where she was always afraid of what people would think.
I'm disappointed that there is no first-person narration from Meihua's mother, Agnes. She's the one who first ventured to China as a missionary. It would have been really nice to hear her story in her words, rather than having a teenaged Yezi summarized her grandmother's dairies. I also found a lot of the dialogue and characters flat. It sort of brings to mind witnesses testifying in court. All of the intentions are good and everyone is sweet and kind.
3/5
About the book:
The Long March Home
ISBN:9781926708270
Date of Publication: November 2011
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