Ingratitude

Amazon.com Review\nPerhaps one has to come from an intensely traditional society such as the one Chinese author Ying Chen describes in her third novel, Ingratitude, in order to fully empathize with the protagonist's desire to commit suicide solely to condemn her mother to a life of suffering: "I was burning with the desire to see Mother suffer at the sight of my corpse. Suffer to the point of vomiting up her own blood. An inconsolable pain." What, one wonders, has the mother done to deserve such a fate? Her worst sin, it appears, is to never have smiled at her daughter. Yan-Zi, the narrator of this slim volume, speaks to us from beyond the grave. As she witnesses her own funeral preparations and the grief of her family and friends, she looks back over the 25 years that she lived. A critical mother, a distant, unloving father--admittedly, Yan-Zi's childhood was not an especially happy one, but Ying Chen's minimal prose and sparse characterization make it difficult to see just what it was that drove this young woman to such extremes of hatred and revenge she would throw herself under a truck just to get back at her mother.
If Yan-Zi's motives for taking such drastic action remain murky, Ying Chen evokes the particulars of her life with laserlike precision. There are the boyfriends, Hong-qi, Chun, and Bi, the bitter relationship between Yan-Zi's mother and her grandmother, and just a subtle hint of the changing political climate in China: "Your father was such an alert man," Yan-Zi's mother says, discussing the car accident that destroyed her husband's mind; "Who knows whether this accident wasn't an attempted murder! You have to keep your eye on these kids, they're crazy today...." It may be that, in China, Yan-Zi's act of self-annihilation would be viewed as the purest form of rebellion against the traditional expectations placed on women in that country; to a Western reader, however, her complaint that "because of Mother, my life would always be flawed" comes off as adolescent whining. Ingratitude is an apt title for this novel, and one that invites several different interpretations.\nDesperate to escape her domineering mother, Yan-Zi decides to commit suicide to remove the bonds of her mother's love, and, in the moments after her death, she recounts with a detached and keen eye the story of her last days\nFrom Publishers Weekly\nNominated for Canada's Governor General's Award and Prix Femina, the third novel (the first to be published in English) by Chinese-Qu?becois Chen is a first-person narrative from beyond the grave: the tale of a 25-year-old woman from a family of traditional Chinese immigrants who plans to stage her own death in order to make her mother suffer. The daughter loathes her mother for giving her a life she never wanted, then robbing her of the freedom to live it for herself. "The day I was born was already the day I was defeated," Yan-Zi explains. After tormenting Yan-Zi through her childhood by competing with her for the attention of her aloof, ineffectual father, Yan-Zi's mother tries desperately to find her a husband but rejects the man Yan-Zi falls for. Yan-Zi responds to these tyrannies, petty and large, by being "faultless," outwardly worthy of the mother whom she knows she can never please. What redeems this long J'accuse from adolescent fantasy is Yan-Zi's death (which she had planned with sleeping pills but achieves accidentally by running into the path of a truck), and the peculiar afterlife where she learns that "You can't turn away from your mother without turning away from yourself.... Fallen leaves return to their roots... traitors to their mothers will continue to be vagabonds, whether dead or alive." With sure-footed prose and a constant movement toward wisdom, no matter how bitter, Chen restrains her material and lends the work an oddly quiet dignity.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.\nFrom Booklist\nAs if we needed more proof that we live in a global villa